Early Mid-Pleistocene mammal fauna from Yanlidong Cave, South China

ABSTRACT

Yanlidong is a cave site in southern China where a diversity of vertebrate palaeontological fossils were recently discovered. Our previous study showed that the Yanlidong sediments can be divided into an early stage and a late stage. Here, we report our analysis of the mammal fossils from the deposits of the Early Stage in Yanlidong (DES-YLD). The age of DES-YLD is constrained to around 600 ka by Uranium-series dating on fossil teeth and layered flowstones. The fauna is characterised by the occurrence of extant taxa plentifully, but also a number of extinct species. Our paleoenvironmental and taphonomic analysis of the DES-YLD fauna indicates that the local environment was covered by subtropical forest and located in a shrub environment near water and rodents were largely responsible for the accumulation and modification of the macromammal remains. The findings from YLD serve to fill an important gap in the Early Middle Pleistocene of southern China. Besides the reconstructions of the paleoenvironment, it is interesting to observe that a large number of Early Pleistocene extinct taxa were replaced by species during the Early Middle Pleistocene that are still extant today. This faunal turnover may be related to the global Middle Pleistocene climate transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Mammal fauna
• U-series dating
• early middle pleistocene
• yanlidong cave
• south China

Aknowledgement

We thank Mr. Feng Tian, Mr. Juping Li, Mr. Guangji Xu and Mr. Chaolin Huang for their participation in field investigation and excavation. We would like to thank the colleagues from the Chongzuo Museum for their assistance in excavation. Finally, we sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the improvement of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Major Programme of the National Social Science Foundation of China (20&ZD246), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41962003, 42002025 and 41877430), the BaGui Scholars Project of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (003), and the Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Environment Change and Resources Use in Beibu Gulf, Ministry of Education NNNU-KLOP-K2101.