Stone Eggs Emitted From The Earth In China?

By James Donahue

March 2006

There is a strange story out of Southern China’s Guizhou Province that tells of a steep cliff on a mountain were egg-shaped stones have been collected for years by the natives.

According to local legend, the eggs appear on a bluff along the side of this mountain every 30 years and the people believe they spring from the rocky mountain itself. The locals have called the place Chan Dan Ya, which means Egg Producing Cliff.

As if to prove their story, many of the natives display the stone eggs in their homes. They claim possession of these eggs brings them good fortune.

The eggs of Chan Dan Ya average about 30 centimeters in diameter. Some are larger than the others. Most are circular or oval in shape and they are light yellow in color. Some say they look something like the dinosaur egg fossils found in Guangdong Province in 1995.

The native myth of stone eggs dropping from a rocky mountain wall at the top of a steep and dangerous cliff every 30 years is among the strangest of stories. Yet these kinds of stories often come from the lips of aboriginal peoples who have inhabited a land for centuries. It may be their way of explaining the unexplained.

There also is a tradition among people like this to entertain themselves, and educate their children, by telling native stories during the long winter months when the crops are harvested and there is little to do.

When my wife and I lived for a winter among the Navajo People in the Southwest, we heard the winter stories from our hosts. They were very much like the Chinese story of eggs dropping out of the side of a rock cliff.

Throughout the Navajo Reservation in the Northeast corner of Arizona there is to be found strange buttes, or flat-topped mountains that appear as if they shot up out of the flat high desert ground. The surface of the buttes, and even the vegetation, is identical to what is found all over the desert below. These things are found all over the landscape. Thinking of how they came to be can boggle the mind.

The natives explain it in their winter stories. They say the buttes just rose up out of the ground. The story is that the buttes came up so fast that sometimes people were caught on top of them and had great difficulty climbing down. Of course the stories are embellished with stories about talking birds, witches and other creatures that helped in the rescues.

When you stand and stare at these buttes long enough, you begin to think the native stories might be about the only way such formations could have been created. It looks as if some mystical force just pushed all of that rock straight up out of the Earth.

Returning to the stone egg story in China, there is a peculiar part of this story that we have not yet revealed.

There has been some scientific study of the eggs. Geologists date the round stones of Chan Dan Ya to about 500 million years ago, prior to the Triassic and Jurassic periods. The rocky wall of the cliff is made of calcareous rock that is common in many geological regions.

One writer asked how a collection of 500 million-year-old Cambrian egg-shaped stones could come together with a common calcareous rock wall. They don’t belong together.