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Paleolithic museum opens in Ningxia
CNTV, June 21, 2011 Print  E-mail

 

A paleolithic museum has opened in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region over the weekend. It specializes in exhibiting ruins of an ancient community inhabited by human begins more than 30-thousand years ago.

The Shui-dong-gou Ruins Museum will exhibit an abundance of animal fossils and stone implements unearthed from the site.

As the only Paleolithic Age historical site to be officially excavated in the Yellow River Region, the Shuidonggou site presents a vivid picture of ancient life 30-thousand years ago.

The site was discovered in 1923 and was among the first paleolithic sites found in China. For the past 90 years, scientists have unearthed more than 50 thousand stone implements and more than 100 pieces of animal fossils after five rounds of excavations.

Some stone artifacts and tools, as well as production techniques for stone tools, which constitute the cultural foundation of Shuidonggou, can rival those of the Mousterian and Aurignacian cultures of Europe, West Asia and North Africa.

Gao Xing, research fellow of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "A large number of 'levallois steinkerns' at the sites are similar in shape to those of considerably remote European Aurignacian culture. We believe that the mutually remote areas shared a similar culture as evidence of 'cultural assimilation of long-distance migration'."

The exhumation of Shuidonggou Ruins showed that human beings lived there more than 30 thousand years ago in the Paleolithic Age, and continued to live there for a long time.

Shuidonggou is known as the birthplace of prehistoric archaeology in China and a historic landmark of cultural exchanges between China and the West.

 
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