Abstract: This article focuses on the Middle Pleistocene lithic artefacts from the disturbed layer 10 and upper Layer 4 in the Longyadong cave site excavated in 1995, Luonan Basin,China. The database comprises lithic artefacts excavated from the inner cave dated to over 250 kyr ago. A total of 18608 lithic artefacts were examined from more than 77000 items. The article describes the way raw materials were exploited and provides a brief typo-technological analysis of stone artefacts.
The attributes ananlysis suggests that early hominids selected a wide variety of raw materials for tool manufacture. All of the raw materials occur locally in riverbank gravels, and were easily procured and transported to site by the occupants. The most preferred raw material is high quality cream quartzite although dark grey quartzite, greywacke, and quartz were frequently used as well.
The lithic assemblage is made up of seven groups. Cores are dominated by specimens with single cortical platform. Double cortical platform is also a common platform type.The lower flake scar frequency on the cores suggest that they were discarded in early stages and indicate the utilisation of abundant raw material resources nearby. This represents a relatively opportunistic approach that did not require the conservation of raw materials. It reflects uneconomical use of raw material, and a percussion technique that was generally unsystematic with the exception of Levallois core preparation.
Most of the flakes are small.Bipolar percussion was infrequently recorded within the assemblage. Direct hard hammer percussion and anvil techniques were the main technological strategies used to reduce stone by early hominids. The percussion techniques used on quartz differ from the other raw materials, evidenced by the lower proportion of anvil technique flakes and a high ratio of bi-polar products. Furthermore, the raw materials appear to have had and influence on the types of the retouched tools produced in cave.
Only three kinds of simple flake toos were identified from the assemblage: scrapers, points, and burins, no heavy-duty tools such as choppers, hand-axes, cleavers, bifacially modified trihedrals, or spheroids were identified, suggesting that a significant functional difference existed between the cave and the surrounding open-air sites. Overall, the complete flakes and the broken flakes are clearly smaller than the retoched flakes in their mean size and average weight. This appears to be the case in the European Middle Palaeolithic studies as well and suggests a deliberate selection of specific size classes for tool manufacture.
The composition of lighic artefacts in the Longyadong cave is similar to the simple Palaeolithic “core-flake tools” cultural pattern found from cave sites and some open-air sites in China during the Middle Pleistocene. However, the lithic assemblage differs significantly from the Lower Palaeolithic open-air sites in Lantian, and the open-air site in South China. Typologically it is very distinct from those collected from the 223 open-air sites in the Luonan Basin as well. The predominance of small flakes and retouched flake tools indicates that the hominid behaviour did not involve heavy-duty activi-ties at the site.

Key words: Lithic artifacts; Hominid behaviour; Longyadong cave; Luonan Basin