Cenxun Cave sits in Taiping Town, Pingguo County, within Baise City in Guangxi — a landscape of karst cliffs and river valleys that has funneled human movement between inland China and the southern coast for millennia. The dated interval for the recovered remains (440–658 CE) spans the late Northern and Southern period through the Sui unification (581 CE) and into the early Tang dynasty (after 618 CE). Archaeological data indicates continuity of local occupation in Guangxi across these political transitions, but the human story is best read at the level of people rather than court names: these centuries saw intensified mobility, trade, and cultural exchange along river corridors.
Limited evidence from Cenxun Cave (three sequenced individuals) suggests maternal lineages belonging to mtDNA haplogroup M, a deep-rooted clade widespread across East and Southeast Asia. While the mitochondrial signal attests to regional maternal ancestry, the few samples cannot resolve finer-scale migrations or the complex interactions between indigenous southern groups and migrants from northern China. In short: the remains speak to a local groundedness in southern China during the Sui–Tang transition, but any broader narrative about population replacement or major influxes would be premature given the small sample size.