PRELIMINARY STUDY ON LITHIC TECHNIQUE AND ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF HOMINID AT HUANGLONG CAVE,YUNXI,HUBEI PROVINCE
湖北郧西黄龙洞古人类石器技术与生存行为探讨

The Huanglong Cave site,discovered in 2004,is an important paleo-anthropological site of Late Pleistocene in China.It has been excavated by a joint archeological team consisting of archaeologists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology(Chinese Academy of Sciences),the Institute of Archeology and Cultural Relics of Hubei Province,and the Cultural Bureau of Yunxi County for three excavation seasons from 2004 to 2006.A large number of human fossils(human teeth),mammalian faunal remains and thirty-eight stone artifacts were unearthed in the past three field seasons.U-series and ESR dating of the cultural layer indicate that the human activities at the site took place in the early Late Pleistocene(ca.100ka).The stone assemblage includes stone hammers(2),core(1),flakes(9),chunks(7),debris(4),bipolars(2),and retouched tools(13).Stone raw materials exploited at the site were locally available from the vein from adjoining rock and cobbles from ancient riverbeds outside the cave.The vein quartz and quartzite is the dominant raw material used for producing stone artifacts at the site.Different strategies were involved in dealing with different raw materials.Quartz and quartzite were processed at the site,and the cobbles may have been flaked somewhere else.The principal flaking technique at the site is direct hammer percussion,followed by bipolar technique.Most artifacts are small and medium in size.Major blanks for tool fabrication are flakes and cobbles.Scrapers are the dominating tool type,together with choppers,picks,burin,and awl.Modified tools appear to be retouched by direct hammer percussion,mostly unifically retouched on the one end and dorsal surface of blanks.It can be concluded that the Huanglong Cave industry bears the features of transition zone between the South and North China.From the study of mammalian fauna,it should be noted that the human were living in evergreen broad-leaved forests mixed with bamboo forests,an environment of north margin of tropical zone.The choppers and picks are efficient working in forest areas for digging roots.On the contrary,light-duty tools with sharp edges as light-scrapers,awl,and burin were more convenient to scrape and cut during hunting or scavenging in the areas.The seventeen seeds of Euphorbiaceae excavated from the cave indicate that early human took up gathering as living strategy to a certain extent.Furthermore,it can be inferred from the fragmented fossils as well as the cut marks and percussion marks preserved on the bone surfaces that the hunting and dismembering activities were adopted by human in the cave.In conclusion,the results indicate that there had been an episode of human occupation in the cave,which provides important data in revealing the adaptive behaviors adopted by early human at the area.