Early Mid-Pleistocene mammal fauna from Yanlidong Cave, South China

Yanlidong is a cave site in southern China where a diversity of vertebrate palaeontological fossils were recently discovered. Our previous study showed that the Yanlidong sediments can be divided into an early stage and a late stage. Here, we report our analysis of the mammal fossils from the deposits of the Early Stage in Yanlidong (DES-YLD). The age of DES-YLD is constrained to around 600 ka by Uranium-series dating on fossil teeth and layered flowstones. The fauna is characterised by the occurrence of extant taxa plentifully, but also a number of extinct species. Our paleoenvironmental and taphonomic analysis of the DES-YLD fauna indicates that the local environment was covered by subtropical forest and located in a shrub environment near water and rodents were largely responsible for the accumulation and modification of the macromammal remains. The findings from YLD serve to fill an important gap in the Early Middle Pleistocene of southern China. Besides the reconstructions of the paleoenvironment, it is interesting to observe that a large number of Early Pleistocene extinct taxa were replaced by species during the Early Middle Pleistocene that are still extant today. This faunal turnover may be related to the global Middle Pleistocene climate transition.