Identification And Analysis Of The Animal Remains Of Long'an's Yahuaidong Site,Guangxi Province

Yahuaidong Site,located in the hillside of one Karst Mountain near Bolang village,Longan county,Nanning city,Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,northwest 1km of You River,44000-4000 years before present.The whole site is divided into 4 parts.The bones belonging to this article are excavated from area B,whose depth is 4.2 m,divided into 24 layers.The late Pleistocene include layer 24 to layer 5,while the Holocene include layer 4 and above.Many stone implements are found in area B,mainly are chipped tools.The period of the late Pleistocene to Holocene is one of the most important point in the study of archaeology.Considering the current situation that Nanning area,full of natural resource,has few research in the field of zooarchaeology.So this article can enrich the contents of this area and this period in a certain extent.The species cover mollusca's gastropoda and lamellibranchia,vetebrate's mammalia,aves,pisce,reptilia.Amphibian and arthropoda are added in the Holocene.Mammals are the most species during 2 phases while the next are gastropoda,lamellibranchia and pisce.I have to questions during the process of identification,including the difficulties to distinguish length of the 3rd phalanges of large and middle deer,whether there are no elephants or not.As a result,I'll use to statistics methods to solve them.From the whole view,animals are stable,so is the environment.Yahuaidong's climate are high temperature and rainy in tens of thousands of years ago according to the species.At the same time,low mountains and hills are the main terrain,covered with plenty of plants and rivers.The bones are influenced under weathering and fluviation because of the special environment.So we can't observe every trace on the bone.What we can see is that there exist peeling,butchering,barbecuing,making tools of kinds of materials.Bone tools has holes,smoothly made.Some made the bones empty.Shells are usually used as knife.At the same time,there is pressure of fishing after the Holocene from the observation of size in shells.The main manmal in the late Pleistocene is large animal,while it changes into middle animal in the Holocene.With the time going by,species and amounts change too.But the whole situation is stable.It shows that ancestors always hunt mammals,while fishing and gathering as added in their daily life.Oryza phytolith is also found in this site.So gathering plants is also an important part of ancestors' life.Compare Yahuaidong,Bailiandong and Lijiagou Site,which also exist in the phase from Pleistocene to Holocene.The main mammals of these 3 sites are all changed form large to middle.The main reason is the Last Glacial Period.However,the influence,decreasing from the North to South,is different because of the geographic situation of the site.As a result,different geographical condition is a key element to affect the life of ancestors'.