Tongtiandong
archaeological site in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China
Tongtiandong (Chinese: 通天洞, Tōngtiāndòng) is an archaeological site in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, just to the south of the Altai Mountains. The site had hunter-foraging human activity circa 40,000 BP (the Mousterian cultural layer was radiocarbon dated to approximately 46,000–44,000 BP, calibrated).
Cave
Until the discovery of Tongtiandong, the typical Mousterian techno-complex had not been identified in China, but the whole reduction sequence of the Mousterian techno-complex has now been identified in Tongtiandong cave.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tongtiandong” as archaeological site in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as archaeological site in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q118903203. Authority coordinates are 47.006, 85.980. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tongtiandong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.