Liujing Man Cave

　　It is situated about 27 kilometers from the county town, near the Liu (Zhou)–Shi (Long) Highway, roughly 1 kilometer east of the Xinxing Farm headquarters. The cave is named Tongtianyan (which means “Sky-Viewing Rock”) because there is a hole in the cave ceiling that allows one to 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 pits on the cave ceiling, and the top wall features dripstone and flowstone sediment deposits. It is judged that before artificial excavation, the cave was almost entirely filled with sediments, which were divided into three layers: the upper layer consists of yellowish-brown travertine slabs about 0.2–0.5 meters thick; the middle layer is yellowish-brown clay and sandy clay containing fragmented gravel and pebbles, about 4–8 meters thick, with thin travertine slabs interspersed in the upper part. The Liujing Man skull and associated animal fossils were discovered within the upper 1–3 meters of this middle layer; the lower layer is made up of 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, and to the northwest lies a vast plain of karst peak forests and isolated peaks. In 1958, workers from the Xinxing Farm, while digging for nitrate-rich mud as fertilizer in this cave, discovered the fossilized skull of Liujing Man along with four thoracic vertebrae, five lumbar vertebrae, one sacrum, one right hip bone, and one each of the left and right femurs. Other fossils unearthed from this cave include teeth and fragmented limb bones of animals such as giant pandas, porcupines, rhinoceroses, saber-toothed tigers, giant tapirs, pigs, bears, badgers, otters, macaques, orangutans, palm civets, beavers, as well as various types of cattle and deer. The discovery of Liujing Man proves that Guangxi was an important part of the birthplace of modern Mongoloid people, with widespread traces of human activity already present in the Late Pleistocene. This has significant implications for the study of human origins and has attracted great attention from scholars both in China and abroad. Domestic archaeologists frequently conduct research here, and scholars from the United States, Japan, Australia, and other countries have also visited the cave for study.