Archaeologist Li Zhanyang: Discovering the Mysteries of Scie
[ Home ]The World's Top Ten Science & Technology News in 1993, National Top Ten Archaeological New Discoveries in 2007, first author of the research paper published on Science in 2017, Ten Great Scientific Processes in China in 2017, Ten Paleontological Processes in China in 2017... Each of the honors above can be seen as a landmark in the field of Chinese Science and Technology, and they are all related to one archaeologist—Professor Li Zhanyang.
Li is an alumni of Shandong University who graduated in 1980 and majors in archaeology. He is a researcher at the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology, an archaeological team leader of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, and an outstanding expert of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China. Lately, Professor Li Zhanyang has been officially employed by Shandong University as Distinguished Professor.
Three Things over Thirty Years
When recalling the past, Professor Li says, "Over the past thirty years, I have done mainly three things." It is these three things that achieve wonders in the fields of paleontology, paleoanthropology, and archeology.
The first event: 1993-1997: Li Zhanyang and dinosaur eggs
On September 3, 1993, Li was appointed as team leader of the Henan Xixia Basin Dinosaur Eggs Fossils Salvage Excavation Team. He began the salvage excavation work with his team members in places which already suffered from illegal excavation. He recorded some details in his archaeological diary.
Dinosaur Egg FossilsXIAMIANPINY
"On October 28th, we finally dug out several dinosaur egg fossils, and my emotions could be described as 'thrilled' rather than merely 'excited'."
"The difficulties of digging out dinosaur fossil eggs was much more than what we expected. The tools we used were hammers and steel drills, and the stratum was malmstone, whose hardness is equal to limestone, so generally one person can dig out only one egg in three days."
With hard work and joy, Li and his team are promoting the excavation work of dinosaur eggs in Xixia Basin, and their achievement has been praised by Science and Technology Daily as being among "The World's Top Ten Scientific and Technological News in 1993'.
The second event: 2005-present, "Xuchang Man" archaic human cranial fossils
In March, 2017, a paper from China showing the result of the identification of "Xuchang Man" archaic human cranial fossils, published on Science magazine shocked the world. It demonstrated a breakthrough of the research on human evolution: the "Xuchang Man", a group living in central China over 100 thousand years ago, who may be the direct ancestor of the early modern Chinese living in Northern China. Professor Li and his research team have been working hard on this remarkable scientific research for over a decade.
In June, 2005, Li took his archaeological team of Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology to do the excavation work at one paleolithic site in Lingjing Town, Xuchang City, Henan Province for the first time. By the end of 2005, they had excavated 2452 pieces of stoneware and over 3000 pieces of animal fossils. On December 17, 2007, the originally scheduled last day of archaeology of the year, one palm-sized archaic human cranial fossil was finally excavated.
Professor Li and the "Xuchang man" archaic human crania modelXIAMIANPINY
6 years later, in May, 2014, Li Zhanyang's team found over 20 archaic human cranias. So far, 45 archaic human cranias has been excavated from the "Xuchang man" site. They are spliced into two relatively complete human cranias, the age of which is 105 to 125 thousand years before present.
The animal fossils come from Lingjing "Xuchang man" siteXIAMIANPINY
The microliths come from Lingjing "Xuchang man" siteXIAMIANPINY
When talking about the origin of homo sapiens, Professor Li says that the "Xuchang people" site is one of the most promising sites for researching ancient humans. Lately, he and his team have achieved new progress in their research there. They have found the earliest bone tool in China, which dates from approximately 115 thousand years before present.
The third event: 2017-present, discovering the origin of homo sapiens in Kenya
The samples of microliths found in KenyaXIAMIANPINY
For solving unexplained puzzles in "Xuchang man" excavation, Professor Li went to Kenya and worked in a joint archaeological team. How did contemporaneous African stoneware look like? What were the human behaviors and technology like there? He would like to find out whether the "Xuchang people" came from Africa or not.
This joint archaeology was a cooperation project supported by Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology, Shandong University, and Kenya National Museum and implemented from 2017. China and Kenya have primarily made an accord that Chinese archaeologists have the naming right of the excavated significant human fossils and new-found hominin cultural site. The preliminary archaeological work has proven that the Baringo region in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa is rich in the remains of the Paleolithic cultural relics.
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