During the
Late Pleistocene glaciation,
sea levels in the area were about lower than in the present day. As a result, the floor of the Taiwan Strait was exposed as a broad land bridge that was crossed by mainland fauna until the beginning of the
Holocene 10,000 years ago. In 1972, fragmentary fossils of
anatomically modern humans were found at Chouqu and Gangzilin, in
Zuojhen District, Tainan, in fossil beds exposed by erosion of the Cailiao River. Though some of the fragments are believed to be more recent, three cranial fragments and a molar tooth have been dated as between 20,000 and 30,000 years old. The find has been dubbed "
Zuozhen Man". No associated artifacts have been found at the site. The oldest known artifacts are
chipped-pebble tools of the
Changbin culture (長濱文化), found at cave sites on the southeast coast of the island. The sites are dated 15,000 to 5,000 years ago, and similar to contemporary sites in Fujian. The primary site of Baxiandong (八仙洞), in
Changbin, Taitung was first excavated in 1968. The same culture has been found at sites at
Eluanbi on the southern tip of Taiwan, persisting until 5,000 years ago. The earliest layers feature large stone tools, and suggest a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Later layers have small stone tools of quartz, as well as tools made from bone, horn and shell, and suggest a shift to intensive fishing and shellfish collection. The distinct
Wangxing culture (網形) was discovered in
Miaoli County in northwest Taiwan in the 1980s. The assemblage consists of
flake tools, becoming smaller and more standardized over time, and indicating a shift from gathering to hunting. Analysis of
spores and
pollen grains in
sediment of
Sun Moon Lake suggests that traces of
slash-and-burn agriculture started in the area since 11,000 years ago, and ended 4,200 years ago, when abundant remains of
rice cultivation were found. The only Paleolithic burial that has been found on Taiwan was in Xiaoma cave in
Chenggong in the southeast of the island, dating from about 4000 BC, of a male similar in type to
Negritos found in the Philippines. There are also references in Chinese texts and Formosan Aboriginal oral traditions to pygmies on the island at some time in the past. In December 2011, a skeleton dated about 8,000 years ago was found on
Liang Island, off the north coast of
Fujian. In 2014, the
mitochondrial DNA of the Liangdao Man skeleton was found to belong to
Haplogroup E, which is today found throughout
Maritime Southeast Asia. Moreover, it had two of the four mutations characteristic of the E1 subgroup. From this, Ko et al. infer that Haplogroup E arose 8,000 to 11,000 years ago on the north Fujian coast, travelled to Taiwan with Neolithic settlers 6,000 years ago, and from there spread to Maritime Southeast Asia with the
Austronesian language dispersal. Soares et al. caution against overemphasizing a single sample, and maintain that a constant
molecular clock implies an earlier date (and more southerly origin) for Haplogroup E remains more likely. == Neolithic ==