ABSTRACT

On June 4, 1920 the French collector Emile Licent discovered a quartzite core in the loess at Xingjiagou, 55 km north of Qingyang in Gansu Province. The discovery of this nucleus, the first Palaeolithic artifact recorded from Chinese territory, spurred further investigation and in 1923 Licent and the French palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discovered Pleistocene archaeological sites at Shuidonggou in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and at Salawusu (Sjara-osso-gol) in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (Licent and Teilhard 1925). All these assemblages were determined to be of Upper Pleistocene, Late Palaeolithic antiquity.