The Komun Moru ruins are "primitive relics" discovered in

Sangwon County Sangwŏn County is a county of North Hwanghae, formerly one of the four suburban counties located in east P'yŏngyang, North Korea. Prior to 1952, Sangwŏn was merely a township of Chunghwa County. In 1952 it was separated as a separate county, ...

Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populatio ...

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...

. Many of the relics are on display at the

Korean Central History Museum The Korean Central History Museum( ko, 조선중앙력사박물관) is a museum located in Pyongyang, North Korea.) The museum is located at the north end of Kim Il-sung Square. It contains displays on Korean history from primitive society to the m ...

. The relics were located in a cave, and have been dated to the

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...

Age. North Korean archaeologists propose that the Komunmoru cave site should be dated about one million years, but "the evidence for supporting this hypothesis is exiguous". A western sources dates the remains at 600 000 years old.

History

According to North Korea, the cave was discovered and surveyed in 1960s. The site was found to contain stone implements (stone hatchets, trapezoid tools, edged chisels and pieces of various tools) and twenty-nine fossilized animal bones (including the Sangwon horse, a buffalo and a monkey that are now extinct). The other fossils are believed to belong to the

Paleozoic The Paleozoic (or Palaeozoic) Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. The name ''Paleozoic'' ( ;) was coined by the British geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1838 by combining the Greek words ''palaiós'' (, "old") and ' ...

Age. A Japanese report indicates that the site was excavated from 1966 to 1970. The limestone cave contained five levels from the floor upwards. The protected relics in question were found in the fourth layer of the site (from the

Lower Paleolithic The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominins appears in ...

era). Aside from these, the first, the third and the fourth layers (from the bottom upward) have yielded "rich faunal remains corresponding to (the) early period of (the) Middle

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

". The tools are described as a biface, a trapezoidal heavy tool, a heavy point, a large flake tool and hammer stone. The stone tools are made of siliceous limestone, while the hammer stones and scrapers are made of vein quartz. Among the features of the tools, heavy flakes and cores were produced by a hurling technique, followed by a few direct percussions to form the cutting edges, with little to no secondary retouches in most cases.

References

{{coord missing, North Korea National Treasures of North Korea Archaeological sites in North Korea Caves of North Korea North Hwanghae