Acta Anthropologica Sinica ›› 1994, Vol. 13 ›› Issue (01): 32-96.
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Ye Xiangkui, Zhang Juzhong
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Abstract: A great lot of turtle shells have been unearthed from Jiahu Site (Neolithic, Peiligang Culture Period) at Wuyang County, Henan Province by the archaeologists of Henan Provincial Antiquities Institute in 1984-1987. Besides many fragmentary shells which are determined in present paper as? Ocadia sinensis and Trionyx spp. respectively, there are more than fifty complete or partly complete shells else. Although these shells bear some small distinctions each other, the main features of them are essentially the same. They posses in common the following characters: 1) size medium; 2) carapace arched moderately; 3) neural plate seven, hexagonal mostly, short-sided behind; 4) bony bridge absent; 5) anterior and posterior lobe of plastron joined each other by hinge, movable; 6) gulo-humcral sulcus cuts entoplastron anteriorly, and humero-pectoral sulcus passes through entoplastron medially; 7) femoro-anal sulcus projects forward, middle part of it approaches to hypo-xiphiplastral suture. By these features, we identified reasonably these shells to Cuora flavomarginata which is the only species of the genus now existing in Henan Province.Cuora, the Asian box tortoises, is a living genus of Emydidae whose members distribute limitedly in East and Southeast Asia. For a long time, no fossil form of the genus has been recognized untill the discovery of Cuora pitheca Yeh from the Late Miocene of Lufeng, Yunnan Province in 1981.Soon after this, Hasegawa Y., a Japanese paleoherpetologist, reported his fossil of Cuora miyatai from the Middle(?)Pleistocene of Japan. Furthermore, Yeh (1983) described one fossil and several sub-fossil specimens of Cuora flavomarginata from Late Pleistocene and Neolithic (Hemudu Culture Period) of Zhejiang Province, and revised (1985) his Terrapene culturlia of Dawenkou Culture Period of Shandong Province to Cuora flavomarginata. So far, the history of the genus Cuora can therefore be written as follows: Late Miocene一Middle(?) Pleistocene一Late Pleistocene一Peiligang Culture Period一Hemudu Culture Period一Dawenkou Culture Period一Recent.After the description and determination of the specimens, several problems about the differentiation of shells, and the human activities appeared on the shells are briefly discussed.
Key words: Turtles; Neolithic; Wuyang; Henan
Ye Xiangkui, Zhang Juzhong. Turtle remains from Jiahu Site at Wuyang, Henan[J]. Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 1994, 13(01): 32-96.
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