Delicate beads found at dig site

Ostrich eggshell beads with holes as small as 1.2 millimeters in diameter have been unearthed at the Gezishan archaeological site in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region in northwest China.

The find sets a record for the smallest artificial ornaments yet found for the Paleolithic period, Guangming Daily reported on Monday.

The Gezishan site, dating to between 12,700 and 8,000 years ago, is a Paleolithic archaeological site discovered in the late 1980s in Qingtongxia.

The delicate beads were found at Gezishan's Location No 10 after water scrubbing and flotation work.

Smaller than the 1.69 mm holes found in beads excavated last year at Gezishan, those in the newly uncovered artifacts are about the size of mechanical pencil cores.

"The exquisite beads and meticulous work the ancestors have done is beyond imagination," said Li Peng, director of the Qingtongxia Institute of Cultural Relics.

A flint artifact with two sharp sides - regarded as the finest object of the Paleolithic period yet unearthed in China - was also uncovered at Gezishan. The double-edged stone, about 17.8 centimeters long and 6.6 cm wide, is about 1 millimeter thick at its thinnest point.

"It may have been used by the ancestors to cut and process animal skins," said Wang Huimin, a researcher at the Ningxia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

"Both chipped-stone tools and polished ones have been found at Gezishan. We cannot yet conclude that these tools belonged to ancient people who lived in the same historic period," Wang said. "But they prove that Gezishan was home to people both of the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages."

Seeds of Salsola collina, Artemisia and Triticeae, as well as architectural relics such as fire pits, were also found.

Archaeological work at the Gezishan site has proceeded to the phase of laboratory analysis.