What did humans look like 16,000 years ago? Here, let me show you their "photos"

Recently, the paper "Facial Restoration of Late Pleistocene Human Fossils from the Yahuai Cave Site in Southern China" was published online in an internationally renowned academic journal. The related research conducted geometric morphological analysis and three-dimensional facial restoration of the ancient human skull from the Yahuai Cave site in Guangxi, which is about 16,000 years old.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency video screenshot

Guangxi is one of the famous places for the production of ancient human fossils and a key area for the emergence and evolution of modern humans. The Yahuai Cave site is located in Long'an County, Guangxi, and was excavated by the Guangxi Institute of Cultural Relics Protection and Archaeology. Researchers have excavated cultural relics from different periods of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages at the site, and discovered a complete human skull fossil that is extremely rare in China, as well as a large number of chipped stone tools and mammal fossils.

01 Skull from a Paleolithic burial

The Yahuai Cave site is located on a solitary mountain in Bolang Village, Qiaojian Town, Longan County, 13 kilometers away from Longan County. It was discovered in 2014 and covers a total area of ​​about 100 square meters. It is reported that this restored human skull was found in a Paleolithic tomb at the site. It is the only complete skull fossil with an exact stratigraphic position and reliable dating found in South China so far. It has a high academic research value and is of great significance to the study of the physical morphology of people at that time.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency video screenshot

02 Rich Stone Products

Stone products are the main cultural relics unearthed this time, with more than 10,000 pieces, including chipped stone tools and polished stone tools, of which chipped stone products account for the vast majority. The types of stone products include stone hammers, stone flakes, fragments, tools, etc. The types of tools include choppers, scrapers, points, cutters, etc. The raw materials of stone products are diverse. In addition to the common sandstone and quartzite, there are also flint, glass meteorites, crystals, etc., which are rarely seen in other prehistoric sites in Guangxi.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency video screenshot

03 The time when humans used rice moved forward

Archaeologists also discovered two prehistoric human fire remains and rice phytoliths dating back 16,000 years, and unearthed a rich variety of animal and plant remains. The suspected rice phytoliths found are about 28,000 years old. In this regard, Gao Xing, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believed during his investigation of the Yahuai Cave site in Longan, Guangxi that the earliest time humans used rice may have moved forward.

04 Filling the gap in prehistoric culture in the Youjiang River Basin

The site not only provides valuable data for studying prehistoric culture in southern my country and Southeast Asia, and the diversity of human behavior and culture in the late Pleistocene, but also fills the gap in prehistoric culture in the Youjiang River Basin and completes the prehistoric cultural sequence of Guangxi.

The Youjiang River originates in Yunnan, and a wealth of prehistoric cultural relics have been discovered in its basin, especially the Paleolithic Artifacts in Baise, Guangxi, which are famous both at home and abroad. However, except for the early Paleolithic culture with obvious characteristics and relatively clear dates, the middle and late cultures have always been vague. The Yahuai Cave site has unearthed a large number of cultural relics with definite layers and dating back 50,000 to 10,000 years, which fills this gap.

Comprehensive sources: Xinhuanet, Fossilnet, etc.