Fa Hien Cave (Pahiyan Gala)

Pahiyangala Cave is a cave in the district of Kalutara, Western Province, Sri Lanka, according to a village legend named after the Buddhist monk Fa-Hien (Wade-Giles: Fa Hsien). However, there is no archaeological or historical evidence to support this legend. The cave is important for the Late Pleistocene human skeletal remains discovered there in the 1960s ,1980s & 2013

The discoveries were important to archaeologists and palaeontologists because the earliest of the people buried in Pahiyangala Cave lived at the same time as European Cro-Magnon man and other hominids of the Late Pleistocene around the world. Studies of the teeth found in the cave indicate that the population of Sri Lanka ground nuts, seeds, and grains in stone querns in the preparation of food, and that they continued to live as hunter-gatherers until about the 8th century BCE. Sri Lanka has yielded the earliest known microliths, which didn't appear in Europe until the Early Holocene