Southern China ¢w the Suggested Cradle of Chinese People

Takung Pao
January 13, 2006

As proposed by Professor Zhang Zhenhong, President of the Center of Lingnan Archaeological Studies, Zhong Shan University, Southern China was not only a place of transit, but it played a pivot role, as far as the origin of the ancient Chinese is concerned. Professor Zhang has the aforesaid hypothesis based on the features of a recently discovered site of the Paleolithic era at Huang Di Dong, Saikung, Hong Kong, namely a large field for stone artifacts making, covering 8,000 square meters, the 6000 artifacts unearthed are middle- and large-sized ones, differing from those unearthed in the northern areas which are small, and some had never been discovered before, indicating a wide variety of stone artifacts were produced at the site in a very skilful way.

Professor Zhang believes that under the ground at Huang Di Dong lie plenty clues to an important hypothesis based on the recent discovery of human genome mapping ¢w ancestors of the contemporary Asian population came from Africa forty to sixty thousand years ago, and that our Africa-born ancestors arrived in China, via East Africa, Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and Southern China. The aforesaid genome mapping discovery challenges a long held view that the contemporary Chinese originated in Northern China.

To support the aforesaid argument, Professor Zhang points out that, among the plenty of stone artifacts unearthed at Huang Di Dong, many are axes, which are typical of the European Paleolithic era, suggesting a close tie between the Paleolithic Europe and the Paleolithic China.