Abstract:

The Shiyu site, situated on the western edge of the Nihewan basin (sensu lato) is an important Late Pleistocene archaeological location in northern China. From an extensive excavation in the last century, a substantial number of lithics, animal bones, and the traces of human fire use were unearthed, along with a limited number of modern human fossils. Recent Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C dating have recalibrated the cultural layer to approximately 44.6±1.2 kaBP. The presence of artifacts with some characteristics of the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) assemblage positions Shiyu as a crucial site for understanding early modern human activities in Northeast Asia.

In this study, 152 faunal bone fragments curated at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) were analyzed from a perspective of vertebrate taphonomy, including age profile assessment, skeletal elements frequency quantification, bone breakage pattern analysis and bone surface modification observation. The objective of this study is to evaluate and discuss the subsistence strategies employed by Shiyu hominins in their exploitation of animal resources. Given the limited sample size, the following tentative conclusions were derived from this research.

Most notably, bone surface modifications revealed a relatively high intensity of human activity, evidenced by a significant frequency of human-inflict damages on bones, including cut marks, percussion marks, and percussion notches. In contrast, natural modifications such as carnivore or rodent tooth marks, sedimentary abrasions, and polish were minimal. Even when considering the potential biases in specimen selection, the evidence strongly supported that humans were the predominate agent of bone accumulation and modification at the site. Furthermore, both bone surface modifications and skeletal elements frequency implied that foragers were most probably engaged in primary butchery of animal carcasses at the site, and subsequently transported selected skeletal elements to a base camp for further processing. The Shiyu site thus can be broadly interpreted as a river-adjacent kill-butchery site. Additionally, we identified a selection of limb bone fragments with distinctive percussive marks as a kind of expedient bone tools, known as bone retouchers. However, regarding the bone fragments from the site previously suspected by some scholars to be bone tools due to their successive scars, it is more reasonable to conclude that these were merely unintended by-products of marrow extraction processes. It is also worth mentioning that a few deliberately produced linear marks were discovered, clearly distinguishable from typical butchery cut marks, undoubtedly reflecting symbolic behaviors and the complexity of human activities to a certain degree.

Key words: Shiyu site, zooarchaeology, taphonomy, bone retoucher, Upper Paleolithic