Meanings
alternative Shang-ch'en
- A village in Yushan, Lantian, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
According to the most recent reports, the earliest evidence of hominins in Asia is in the Shangchen site in Lantian in the northern Qinling Mountains with, and the age range is 2.12—1.26 Ma (Zhu et al., 2018).
2018 October 15, Xuefeng Sun, Huayu Lu, Shejiang Wang, Xinghua Xu, Qingxuan Zeng, Xuehe Lu, Chengqiu Lu, Wenchao Zhang, Xiaojian Zhang, Robin Dennell, “Hominin distribution in glacial-interglacial environmental changes in the Qinling Mountains range, central China”, in Quaternary Science Reviews, volume 198, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 482 more examples
The new finds imply that hominins covered vast distances before 2 million years ago — Shangchen is 14,000 kilometres from the nearest sites in East Africa where other hominins of this age have been found. It’s possible that the Shangchen toolmakers, hunter-gatherers, were simply following their foods, says Vivek Venkataraman, an evolutionary ecologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
2018 July 11, Colin Barras, “Tools from China are oldest hint of human lineage outside Africa”, in Nature, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 19 Feb 2019At the same time, the earliest hominin evidence outside Africa came from our newly found 2.12-million-year old^([sic – meaning year-old]) stone tools, which were found at Shangchen, a paleolithic locality, in Lantian County in the southern margin of the Chinese Loess Plateau.
2019 August 29, Zhaoyu Zhu, Weiwen Huang, Yi Wu, Shifan Qiu, Zhiguo Rao, Shixia Yang, Yamei Hou, Jiubing Xie, Jiangwei Han, Shuqing Fu, Tingping Ouyang, Houyun Zhou, Shasha Peng, Robin Dennell, “New progress in the geochronology of hominin relics in loess strata of the Chinese Loess Plateau”, in Chinese Science Bulletin, volume 64, number 25, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC
Origin
- Mandarin上陳 /上陈
- EnglishShangchen
From Mandarin 上陳 /上陈 (Shàngchén).
More words from Mandarin
Full word history & related roots →Translations
Chinese Mandarin 上陳 /上陈
- 上陳 /上陈 (Shàngchén)village in western China
Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
Shangchen. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Shangchen
“Shangchen.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Shangchen. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Shangchen,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Shangchen.
Source: Shangchen on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.