Luminescence dating of the Jigongshan Paleolithic site in Hubei Province, southern China

• Published in: Quaternary international 2020-07, Vol.554, p.36-44
• Main Authors: Xiaoqi, Guo, Xuefeng, Sun, Xiaobo, Feng, Shuangwen, Yi, Xinying, Zhou, Deyin, Liu, Qiqi, Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Glacial; Interglacial; Jigongshan; OSL; Paleolithic; TT-OSL
• ISSN: 1040-6182; 1873-4553
• DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2020.08.014

The Jigongshan (JGS) Paleolithic site in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River has two different cultural layers, namely, the upper (flake-tool industry) and lower (cobble-tool industry) cultural layers. JGS site is also among the few upper Paleolithic sites in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River with an absolute age. Peking University has performed a preliminary 14C dating at the site and found that the upper culture layer is approximately 10–20 ka, whereas the lower layer is older than 50 ka. To date the lower culture layer precisely, the standard quartz single-aliquot regenerative (SAR) dose-based optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and thermally transferred OSL (TT-OSL) methods were used in this study. Results showed that the age of the upper culture layer is approximately 23 ± 2–38 ± 3 ka, whereas that of the lower culture layer is approximately 115 ± 9–149 ± 9 ka. The 14C and OSL dating methods showed huge differences in their results for the lower culture layer. Based on our dating results, we propose that the main part of the upper culture layer corresponds to the late MIS 3 to the early MIS 2 stages during the glacial period in L1 unit in the Chinese loess sequence, whereas the lower culture layer corresponds to the late MIS 6 and the early MIS 5 stages during both glacial and interglacial periods in the upper L2 and the lower S1 units. A cultural gap of nearly 100 ka was observed between these two cultural layers; this gap is larger than what was expected.