“Liujing Man” Cave

“Liujing Man” Cave

The “Liujing Man” Cave (Tongtianyan)

Located about 27 kilometers from the county town, near the Liuzhou–Shilong Highway, approximately 1 kilometer east of the Xinxing Farm headquarters. It is named Tongtianyan (Sky-Viewing Rock) because there is a hole in the cave ceiling through which one can look up at the sky. The cave entrance faces north, is about 2 meters high and 2.5 meters wide. Inside is a long, narrow, tubular karst cave. There are many stone basins on the cave ceiling, and the top walls feature dripstones and flowstone-type sediments. It is judged that before artificial excavation, the cave was almost entirely filled with deposits, which are divided into three layers: the upper layer consists of yellowish-brown calcareous tufa slabs, about 0.2 to 0.5 meters thick; the middle layer is yellowish-brown clay and sandy clay containing crushed gravel and pebbles, about 4 to 8 meters thick, with thin layers of calcareous tufa slabs interspersed in the upper part. The “Liujing Man” and associated animal fossils were found within the upper 1 to 3 meters of this layer; the lower layer is gray medium-fine sand mixed with a yellow dense, moist clay layer, less than one meter thick. The area around the cave features gently undulating hills, with large areas of karst peak forest plains and isolated peak plains distributed to the northwest. In 1958, workers from Xinxing Farm discovered the fossilized skull of “Liujing Man” as well as four thoracic vertebrae, five lumbar vertebrae, one sacrum, one right hip bone, and one each of the left and right femurs while digging for nitrate-rich mud to use as fertilizer in this cave. Also unearthed in this cave were teeth and fragmented limb bone fossils of animals such as giant pandas, porcupines, rhinoceroses, saber-toothed tigers, giant tapirs, pigs, bears, badgers, otters, macaques, orangutans, civets, beavers, as well as various types of cattle and deer. The discovery of “Liujing Man” proves that Guangxi is an important part of the birthplace of modern Mongoloid people, with widespread traces of human activity already present in the Late Pleistocene. It holds significant importance for the study of human origins and has attracted great attention from scholars both in China and abroad. Domestic archaeologists frequently visit the site for research, and scholars from the United States, Japan, Australia, and other countries have also come to study the cave.