ArchaeoChats Ep 2: Dr. Shixia Yang, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr. Shixia Yang is a Palaeolithic archaeologist from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After completing her PhD in 2015, Shixia spent two years as postdoc at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology and Geophysics and was awarded a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to conduct research at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History between 2017 and 2019. Shixia’s research examines how human evolution relates to climate change, and specifically how humans have adapted to different environments in East Asia through stone tool production. Shixia works on a project titled: “Behavioral Adaptations of the Earliest Humans in East Asia” in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute, and has published a variety of papers on the lithic assemblages and technological innovations in the Loess Plateau and the Nihewan Basin of China. Shixia was part of a team that discovered the earliest stone tools outside of Africa in China at 2.1 million years ago which was published in Nature in 2018.