Lantian Man Site 蓝田猿人遗址

About Lantian Man Site

The geopark's scenic-area note records that the site was found in 1963-1964 during Chinese Academy of Sciences fieldwork on Cenozoic strata at Lantian. It gives the earliest-found Homo erectus mandible as 600,000 to 650,000 years old and the Gongwangling Homo erectus cranium as 1.1 to 1.15 million years old, and says the find was acclaimed as a major scientific discovery of the 1960s in international archaeology. The Lantian County culture and tourism bureau's page gives the skullcap as 1.15 million years old and adds that the most recent determination is 1.63 million years; the two cited pages do not agree on the age, and this record does not settle between them. Alongside the hominin fossils the geopark note counts more than fifty palaeolithic stone artefacts, over two thousand animal fossils and Quaternary loess sections, and classifies the mammal fossils recovered here as the Lantian Gongwangling fauna (蓝田公王岭动物群).

The site lies about 40 km from Xi'an and a little over 20 km from the county seat. Its facility was built in 1979 and opened to the public in 1982, covers about 13,000 square metres, and is laid out as a site protection zone, a cultural display zone and a general services zone. In 1982 the State Council listed the site in the second national group of key protected cultural relics; it was graded a national AAA tourist scenic area in 2004; UNESCO announced it in 2009 as a core scenic area of the Qinling Zhongnanshan Global Geopark; the county authorised a Lantian Man Site Museum in 2014; and in 2017 a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute of vertebrate palaeontology and palaeoanthropology established a workstation at the site. Neither cited page states which of the excavated material is on display here.

What to look for

• Gongwangling itself, the ridge in Jiujianfang Town where the Homo erectus cranium was excavated
• The layout of the site as the county bureau describes it: a site protection zone, a cultural display zone and a general services zone across about 13,000 square metres
• The Quaternary loess sections that the geopark note counts among the site's material, alongside more than fifty palaeolithic stone artefacts and over two thousand animal fossils
• The Lantian Man Site Museum, whose founding the county authorised in 2014

Location & getting there

Getting to Lantian Man Site

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 蓝田猿人遗址 with 西安市 and 蓝田县.