The Bose Basin (百色盆地高岭坡遗址) is in the western part of

Guangxi Guangxi (; ; alternately romanized as Kwanghsi; ; za, Gvangjsih, italics=yes), officially the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in South China and bordering Vietnam ...

province in southern China, around the city of

Baise Baise (; local pronunciation: ), or Bose, is the westernmost prefecture-level city of Guangxi, China bordering Vietnam as well as the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan. The city has a population of 4.3 million, of which 1.4 million live in the ...

(Bose), and is the site of the oldest known cutting tools of the

Acheulean Acheulean (; also Acheulian and Mode II), from the French ''acheuléen'' after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by the distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand axes" associated ...

Xu et al. 2012
Spatial distribution of Paleolithic sites in Bose Basin, Guangxi, China
. ''Quaternary International'' 281. 10-13.Bose, China
at

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with 7. ...

siteHou Y.; Potts, R.; Yuan, B.; Guo, Z.; Deino, A.; Wang, W.; Clark, J.; Xie, G.; Huang, W. 2000
Mid-Pleistocene Acheulean-like stone technology of the Bose Basin, South China
''Science'' 287, 1622-1626.

archaeological industry :''Not to be confused with industrial archaeology, the archaeology of (modern) industrial sites.'' In the archaeology of the Stone Age, an industry or technocomplex is a typological classification of stone tools. An industry consists of a n ...

in China. It is about in area. The first discovery was in 1973, when petroleum geologists accidentally ran across a dozen stone artifacts. Paleolithic stone tools, notably

hand axe A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or ...

s have since been found at 114 sites in the basin. They were found in a

tektite Tektites (from grc, τηκτός , meaning 'molten') are gravel-sized bodies composed of black, green, brown or grey natural glass formed from terrestrial debris ejected during meteorite impacts. The term was coined by Austrian geologist Franz ...

layer dated to 800,000 years ago. Fossils in some of the caves may be 2 million years old.

References

Paleolithic sites in China Paleoanthropological sites {{Guangxi-geo-stub