Published on : 02/10/2024

On October 2, 1984, a human skull was unearthed from the Jinniushan site (金牛山遺址).

The Jinniushan site is located in Xitian Village, Yong'an Town, Dashiqiao City, Yingkou, Liaoning Province. It is a cave site on a limestone hill.

The discovery of the site can be traced back to the early 1940s, while formal excavation and research work began in the 1970s.

In September 1984, Professor Lu Zun-e (呂遵諤) of the Department of Archaeology at Peking University (now School of Archaeology and Museology) led a group of graduate students studying Palaeolithic archaeology to carry out field training at the Jinniushan site.

Starting from September 27, they gradually discovered a batch of human fossils.

On October 2, the team found a group of human fossils in the cave deposits at site A. Among them was a relatively complete skull missing its lower jaw, which belonged to a young male individual.

The skull is 20.4 centimetres long and 14.9 centimetres wide, with a relatively low forehead, similar to Homo erectus, but the brain capacity has reached over 130 millilitres.

In addition, the skull wall is thinner; the brow ridges are not obvious, and the width of the frontal lobes of the brain has significantly increased.

The skull of the Jinniushan Man retains some primitive characteristics of Homo erectus, but also has some advanced characteristics, representing an intermediate type from Homo erectus to early Homo sapiens.

Based on the stratigraphy of the lower deposit and the co-existing animal fossils, the geological age of the site is the late Middle Pleistocene, which is the early Palaeolithic era. Uranium-series dating indicates that the site is about 28,000 years old.

The Jinniushan Man fossil is, so far, the only hominid fossil in the Middle Pleistocene of East Asia that preserves both the skull and torso and limb fossils simultaneously.

It is the most complete hominid skeleton fossil of this stage in East Asia and is therefore extremely valuable.