Overview of the Fine Stoneware Culture

Cultural sites of this era have been found in many places on the Loess Plateau, such as Shayuan in Dali, Shaanxi, and Xiachuan in Qingshui, Shanxi.

A culture characterized by fine beaten stone tools. The raw materials of stone tools are mainly stone pith, agate and flint. There are polygonal conical stone cores, elongated stone flakes (stone leaves), small stone flakes, etc. Composite tools have appeared, such as small elongated stone flakes embedded in bone knives for use, and bows and arrows have been widely used.

The Chiyu culture and the Xujiayao culture have the primitive appearance of the fine-stone culture; the fine-stone culture flourished in the late Paleolithic to the Mesolithic, such as China's earliest fine-stone culture was found in the Lingjing of Henan Province and the Dali Shayuan of Shaanxi Province, etc.; the fine-stone culture can be continued to the Neolithic age, and can even be continued to the age of the use of copper and stone. China's fine stoneware culture is widely distributed in the northeast, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Xinjiang. The fine stoneware culture tradition may be related to the hunting-oriented lifestyle of human beings at that time.

From the available archaeological data, the fine stone tools of East Asia are earlier than those of Western Europe, and there are differences in nature. Therefore, fine stone tools cannot be attributed entirely to the general miniaturization tendency of human stone tools in the Holocene. Some people have divided the early Chinese fine stone tool tradition of North China into the Shiachuan type and the Hutouliang type, and have suggested that the former came from North China, and the latter came from the Baikal Lake area.

The technological factor of pressing and flaking in the fine stone tool industry is likely to be the Lerwaluwa technology from the Juktai or Shuidonggou cultures, which originated in the Middle East, while the way of use and miniaturization of the fine stone tools were adopted from the small stone tools of North China. In Jinshtai Cave, archaeologists have found a mixture of Lerwaluwa technology, small stone tool traditions, and fine stone tool culture, suggesting that there was likely such a mix of technologies, which led to the creation of a fine stone tool culture.

But some people, based on the general miniaturization of human stone tools and the differences between the different technological traditions in East Asia, attribute the production of fine stone tools to the North Asian technological traditions of their own development, and believe that the Chinese fine stone tools are entirely from Siberia and Mongolia.