GAO Xing

Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100044 China

FIRST PARAGRAPH: The nature of Paleolithic “handaxe” in China and East Asia is a highly debatable research issue. During the last three decades, “handaxe” have been discovered at some claimed Middle Pleistocene localities in southern and central China and regarded as evidence to invalidate the hypothesis of the so-called “Movius Line” and to suggest that there is no obvious technological and typological difference between the East and the West. In the meantime, some scholars insist that those finds are in fact not real handaxes and should have nothing to do with the contemporaneous western Acheulian industry; Early Paleolithic industries in East Asia do exhibit fundamental differences with these of the west. To some extent, such debates are superficial, for most of the discussions are stuck on terminology and description of some selected samples, and different researchers adopted different criteria to classify those artifacts, and most of the illustrated samples are surfaces finds, without clear stratigraphy and chronology, therefore, arguments based on such materials are hardly convincing.

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