Magnetostratigraphy Study Of The Pleistocene Nanzhai Section (Xiangfen, Shanxi)

Dingcun Paleolithic artifacts are one of the most important Paleolithic artifacts in China. The Dingcun site located by the Fen River in Xiangfen City, Shanxi. The fossil hominids were diagnosed as early Homo sapiens, with a cultural age of Middle Paleolithic, and geologic age of early Late Pleistocen.The set of sediments that yielded Dingcun man and associated artifacts is named as Dingcun Formation (Dingcun Fm.). There are two divergent hypotheses: the assignment to early Late Pleistocene and the assignment to Middle Pleistocene.In order to study the age of the Dingcun Formation, this paper investigate the Nanzhai section nearby Dingcun locality. The thermal demagnetization results indicate that the whole section only possess normal polarity. However compare to the standard Luochan section on the Chinese Loess Plateau, the Nanzhai section (60m) should have part of the Matuyama reversal polarity. This paper explain the results and suggests that the upper part of the section is normal loess/paleosol series, while the lower part is redeposited loess and paleosols. On the base of the tectonic background, this paper also propose a local depositional model, and suggest that the age of Dingcun Fm. belong to the early Late Pleistocene.