Stone Artifacts With Handaxes and Picks Found in Danjiangkou Reservoir Area, China

Danjiangkou reservoir is located in the northwest of Hubei province and southwest of Henan province at the headwaters area of the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. In October, 2004, Scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted a survey around the margin of the reservoir that will later be submerged upon completing a new section of the dam, and found 367 lithic artifacts with handaxes and picks from 43 open-air sites, distributed upon different terraces along the Hanshui River and its tributary Danjiang River. The finding of handaxes and picks offers new materials to discuss the diffusion and cultural communication of early hominids, researchers reported in the latest issue of Acta Anthropologica Sinica 2012 (2).

Early hominids living at the Hanshui River and Danjiang tributary, near the Danjiangkou reservoir, selected cobbles as raw material from nearby gravel levels of a river bank to make stone artifacts. The artifacts include cores, flakes, chopper-chopping tools, scrapers, spheroids, picks and handaxes. The predominant raw materials are quartz and siliceous limestone, and secondarily, quartzite, sandstone and quartz sandstone
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Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology