Site of the Lingshan Man

Site of the Lingshan Man

The Site of the Lingshan Man is a cultural relic protection unit of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Site of the Lingshan Man

It is situated at Ma'an Mountain in Zicong Village, Sanhai Township, Lingshan County. The mountain is a karst isolated peak shaped like a saddle. Beneath the mountain are three caves: Dongsheng Rock, Pudi Rock, and Jintou Rock.

In 1960, an archaeological team from Guangdong Teachers College, the Cultural Relics Management Committee of Guangdong Province, and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including experts such as Jia Lanpo, Gu Yumin, and Gu Yan, discovered a tympanic part of a temporal bone, two teeth, and a segment of the upper left femur in Dongsheng Rock; and a parietal bone and three frontal bones in Pudi Rock. Dongsheng Rock also yielded fossils of bears and calcified snails, while Pudi Rock produced fossils of the Chinese rhinoceros, wild boar, deer, and cattle. Experts have identified these as human bone fossils from the late Pleistocene, naming the site the "Lingshan Man" fossil discovery location. Additionally, at the ancient human site in Hongku Cave on Shibeishan Mountain, a parietal bone, a hip bone, an upper molar, and two plate-like teeth were unearthed, representing an elderly individual from the Paleolithic Age. At the Huayan Cave site on Zhongxiushan Mountain in Zhongxiu Township, Shitang County, ten skull fragments, seventy teeth, one hip bone, one perforated stone bead, and several pottery shards with net and rope patterns were found, which have been identified as human bones from the Neolithic Age.