(TibetanReview.net, Apr15’25) – Humans had moved to Tibet over 10,000 years ago, according to recent discovery of stone tools and animal fossils, reported China’s online Tibet news service tb.tibet.cn Apr 15, citing Chinese archaeologists. The report claims this to be evidence of Tibet being an important part of the multi-faceted structure of the Chinese people.
The report said archaeologists from China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Cultural Heritage Administration, and the TAR Cultural Heritage Protection Research Institute announced this during their joint work report conference on archaeological excavations in Tibet held in Beijing.
Many key achievements of archaeological excavations in Tibet from 2021 to 2024, as well as a series of archaeological discoveries and research were announced, the report said.
From 2021 to 2024, the TAR Institute of Cultural Relics Protection and Research cooperated with many scientific research institutions to carry out 34 automatic archaeological excavation projects related to 17 ancient ruins and ancient tombs, the report said.
Of them the report cited cultural relics such as stone tools and animal fossils found in the Zangkargang site in Toelung Dechen County of Lhasa City and the Melong Tagphuk cave in Gegyai County of Ngari Prefecture.
Through scientific dating methods, it is shown that their age is 10,000 years ago, which shows that human beings had already moved to the central area of the Tibetan Plateau 10,000 years ago, the archaeologists have said.
Those who participated in the Tibet Archaeological Research Work Report Conference in Beijing were stated to include a total of 12 scientific research institutions.
Noting that a large number of archaeological discoveries show that different periods of technological civilization have been nurtured and developed in Tibet, the report then gave a political twist to these research and findings by calling Tibet an important part of the multi-faceted structure of the Chinese people, attracting great attention from the scientific community at home and abroad.
Correction: It has been pointed out that the figure of 10,000 mentioned in this report should read as 100,000, that the tb.tibet.cn source report of Apr 15, 2025, mentioning “10,000 years” may be due to machine translation error, given previous Chinese state media reports on this matter. The figure should stand corrected accordingly. – Editors