Homo erectus inhabited what is now China more than a million years ago.

Xiaochangliang, the site of some of the earliest Paleolithic remains in East Asia, located in the Nihewan Basin in Yangyuan County, Hebei, is most famous for the stone tools discovered there, including side and end scrapers, notches, burins, and disc cores.

Although it is generally more difficult to date Asian sites than African sites because Asian sites typically lack volcanic materials that can be dated isotropically, the age of the tools has been magnetostratigraphically dated as 1.36 million years.

This method is more accurate than carbon dating since it uses the data of changes caused by earth's magnetic field.