New discovery of a late Middle Pleistocene mammalian fauna in Ganxian Cave, Southern China

ABSTRACT

This report describes fossils recovered from Ganxian Cave in 2008 and 2018 by the Natural History Museum and Anthropology Museum of Guangxi. The cave sedimentary fill yielded rich mammalian fossils consisting mainly of isolated teeth of medium- to large-sized mammals (Primates, Proboscidea, Perissodactyla, Carnivora, Rodentia, Artiodactyla) of typical ‘Ailuropoda-Stegodon’ fauna, (e.g. Stegodon orientalis, Ailuropoda baconi, Pongo weidenreichi, Tapirus sinensis, Megatapirus augustus, Crocuta ultima), and more numerous extant species belonging to 28 taxa in total. The biochronological age of the fauna agreed with the age estimates obtained using Uranium–series and coupled ESR/U-series dating. Collectively, these results indicate a Ganxian fossil age range of 168.9 ± 2.4 ka to 362 ± 78 ka and establish Ganxian Cave as one of the most precisely dated Middle Pleistocene fossil sites in southern China. Comparison of Ganxian fauna with Pleistocene fossil records of the well-documented faunas of southern China and southeast Asia indicates that the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) probably first appeared in Ganxian Cave. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction-based analysis of the large mammalian fossil assemblage from Ganxian Cave indicates that during the late Middle Pleistocene, the habitat consisted mainly of forests with some open areas and the climate was warm and humid.

KEYWORDS:

• Large mammals
• Ailuropoda-Stegodon fauna
• late Middle Pleistocene
• Ganxian
• Southern China

Acknowledgments

We thank Q. Y. Huang, and F. Tian (Tiandong County Museum), C. L. Huang and S. W. Xie (Natural History Museum of Guangxi), J. P. Li (Anthropology Museum of Guangxi), for their participation in the field investigation and excavation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2022.2139180

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China (20&ZD246); the National Natural Science Foundation of China 41877430,42002025 (42002025, 41877430); the BaGui Scholars Project of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.