Huashilang Site

　　Huashilang Site is situated at Huashilang in Jiaojiao Village, where the Xianhe River, Shimen River, and Luohe River converge, about 5 kilometers north of Luonan County. On the hillside east of Huashilang, there is an ordinary small cave approximately 4 meters high, 2 meters wide, 8.8 meters deep, and covering an area of 20 square meters. Inside the cave, there are three layers of ancient human habitation surfaces.

　　The Huashilang Longya Cave site was first discovered in the 1960s. The site area includes the interior of Longya Cave as well as the slope deposits of the second-level terraces of the nearby Nanluo River and its tributary Shimen River.

　　Longya Cave is a fissure-type deep cave formed in a limestone mountain, with a cave area of about 20 square meters. Excavations and cleaning carried out from 1995 to 1997 over three consecutive years by the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, the Shangluo Regional Cultural Relics Management Committee, and the Luonan County Cultural Relics Management Committee confirmed that the Longya Cave site is a rare, largely well-preserved, and richly contented early Paleolithic human cultural site. The Institute of Geology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used thermoluminescence dating to determine that the cultural layer accumulation dates back approximately 500,000 to 250,000 years.

　　The Huashilang Longya Cave site has yielded an extremely rich array of early human cultural remains and artifacts, including the molar fossil of the Luonan Ape Man, an early human from the Paleolithic era; living activity footprints; evidence of fire use; as well as teeth fossils of various amphibious mammals living in water, and fossils of more than twenty types of mammals such as pandas, elephants, bears, rhinoceroses, tapirs, beavers, deer, wild boars, and cattle, along with fish and turtle fossils. In addition, over 65,000 stone artifacts manufactured by early humans from the Paleolithic era were unearthed. These stone artifacts were mostly made from raw materials such as quartzite, quartz, and gravel collected from the riverbanks. Types include stone cores, flakes, fragments from flaked stone tools, as well as tools such as scrapers, points, and burins.

　　The Huashilang Longya Cave site is the southernmost early Paleolithic human site in northern China, filling a gap in the Paleolithic record of the Qinling Mountains. It holds significant academic value for research on the development and exchange of early Paleolithic human culture in China and around the world, the economic and lifestyle patterns of early humans, and ecological environment changes since the Quaternary period.

　　In July 2001, the State Council officially announced the fifth list of Major National Historical and Cultural Sites, and the Huashilang Site in Luonan County was included as No. 111 in the category of ancient sites, becoming the only “national protection” site selected in all of Shangluo and even southern Shaanxi.

　　Location: 5 kilometers north of Luonan County, Shangluo City, Shaanxi Province

　　Transportation: In Luonan County, you can take a minibus to Chengguan Town, then rent a car to reach Jiaojiao Village.