Typical artifacts of the TMP ("Terminal Middle Paleolithic" ~50–38 ka BP) techno-complex found in the Tongtiandong Cave site of Northwest China (1: Levallois core; 2: Discoid core; 3: Levallois flake; 4,5,6: Levallois points; 7,10,11: Mousterian point; 8,9: Scraper; 1–11).[1]
Tongtiandong (
Chinese: 通天洞, Tōngtiāndòng) is an archaeological site in the
Xinjiang Autonomous Region of
China, just to the south of the
Altai mountains. The site had hunter-foraging human activity circa 40,000 BP (the Mousterian cultural layer was radiocarbon dated to approximately 46,000–44,000 BP, calibrated).[1][2][3]
Cave
Until the discovery of Tongtiandong, the typical
Mousterian techno-complex had not been identified in China, but the whole reduction sequence of the Mousterian techno-complex has now been identified in Tongtiandong cave.[4]
From Tongtiandong and other sites, a general distributional pattern of different techno-complexes between Mongolia-Siberia and northern China can be established, for the dates between 50,000 and 32,000 cal BP.[1]
^Betts, Alison; Vicziany, Marika; Jia, Peter Weiming; Castro, Angelo Andrea Di (19 December 2019).
The Cultures of Ancient Xinjiang, Western China: Crossroads of the Silk Roads. Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. p. 10.
ISBN978-1-78969-407-9. "Recent excavations at the cave site of Tongtiandong in the southern Altai have revealed evidence for human activity at around 40 k BP (Yu and He 2017), and one other stratified but undated preBronze Age context is known, from the site...