The deep soil by a permanent spring in a vegetable allotment on the edge of the small town of Lingjing near Xuchang City in Henan Province, China has provided a wealth of stone artefacts and bone fragments to a depth of 10 m (see Denisovan(?) remains in the garden, March 2017). Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of mineral grains shows that the last time that the deepest soils were exposed to sunlight was between 78 to 123 ka. Long before the first arrival of anatomically modern humans (AMH) in China the site had been much as it is today, a human habitation site. Among the bones were fragments of the crania from five human individuals, perhaps either Homo erectus descended from the earliest arrivals in China or more recent Denisovans closely related to the Neanderthals of western Eurasia. Reconstruction of the two most complete crania hinted at the second possibility by resemblance to Neanderthal anatomy yet the complete lack of evidence that Neanderthals travelled so far to the east.

So far there have been no reports of DNA from these enigmatic fossils, but some of the bones from the deepest layers show etched, roughly parallel lines (Li, Z et al. 2019. Engraved bones from the archaic hominin site of Lingjing, Henan Province. Antiquity, v. 370, p. 886-900; DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2019.81). Analysis shows that they were deliberately made after the bones had been defleshed: the fragments have thin veneers of red ochre through which the deep scratches reveal white bone. They are not cut marks, but the scratches on previously reddened bone suggest some form of design. This is by no means the earliest symbolic art, for shells associated with Eugene Dubois’s ~500 ka old ‘Pithecanthropus’ (Homo) erectus remains from Trinil, Java are similarly engraved (see Art from half a million years ago. December 2014). Yet the Lingjing engravings predate the oldest know symbolic art from the Blombos Cave of South Africa that was produced by AMH who lived in about 75 ka ago. Neanderthal artistic ability has shown up at many sites (see Human evolution and migrations, March 2011; May 2016; February 2018)

An ability to express mental concepts of some kind in a durable way now seems to have characterised at least four human species over the last half-million years.

See also: Schuster, R. 2019. Prehistoric Art or Doodle? 110,000-year-old Engraved Bones Create New Mystery (Haaretz, 31 July 2019); Denisovan(?) remains in a Chinese garden (Earth-logs, March 2017)