Newly discovered Late Paleolithic sites in the southeastern margin of the Badain Jaran Desert, northwest China

Abstract

The Badain Jaran Desert (BDJL) is the second largest desert in China and is largely uninhabitable today. However, a number of Paleolithic cultural remains have been found in and around the BDJL, suggestive of earlier occupations by human foragers. Unfortunately, most of these artifacts were surface collected and lack reliable radiometric dates, making it difficult to further understand when prehistoric peoples entered the desert and how they survived once there. As a result of recent multidisciplinary fieldwork, eleven new lithic sites (BDJL1-11) were discovered in the southeastern margin of the BDJL. Four of these were initially excavated and found to contain buried Paleoliths, and the other seven sites had stone tools distributed on the surface. The stone artifact collections include microblades, small flakes, and scrapers, representing typical stone tool types of the Late Paleolithic in northern China. We applied Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C dating to the buried sites’ stratigraphy and OSL dating to the underlying stratigraphy of the surface sites. The results suggest that: human foragers obtained water and possibly hunted near small lakes that were present in interdune basins (BDJL1-2) after 10.1 ka; humans settled in the rockshelter (BDJL3) and the cave (BDJL4) in the mountain basin around 5.9 ka and between 6.4 and 6.2 cal ka BP, separately; foragers hunted and used water in the proluvial fan margin with relatively favorable water and vegetation conditions (BDJL5-11) between approximately 9.3 ka and 7.6 ka, even later; humans collected stone materials and possibly used water along seasonal streams at the proluvial fan outlet (MDLS1-7) after approximately 7.3 ka. Temperature and precipitation simulated by Trace-21ka indicate that the climate of the BDJL was relatively warm and humid during the Early and Middle Holocene. The combination of better moisture conditions and increasing population density as evidenced by the increased number of microblade sites in the Yellow River Basin likely drove the migration and dispersal of human populations into the desert. This study reveals the diversity in resource utilization and the relative abundance of different activities by Late Paleolithic hunter-gatherers during the Early and Middle Holocene in the currently resource-scarce BDJL. The resource exploitation patterns of the BDJL human foraging groups provide new insights into prehistoric human adaptations to desert regions in northwestern China.