“…In the CAOB, especially in the Chinese Altai and adjacent area, a huge Early Paleozoic flysch sequence occurs extensively ( Fig. 1) but little is known for the provenance and tectonic setting of the sequence, which is crucial to understand the crustal formation and tectonic evolution of the orogenic belt (Buslov et al, 2002;Chen and Jahn, 2002;Li et al, 2006;Long et al, 2007Long et al, , 2008Ota et al, 2007;Utsunomiya et al, 2009;Kröner et al, 2010b;Rojas-Agramonte et al, 2011). In the Chinese Altai, source composition and geochemical features of the flysch sequence have been poorly addressed (He et al, 1990;Chen and Jahn, 2002;Li et al, 2006;Long et al, 2007;Long et al, 2010), because previous studies in this orogen mostly focus on the age and petrogenesis of igneous rocks and are rarely related to the sedimentary sequence Xu et al, 2003;Zhang et al, 2003Zhang et al, , 2004Wang et al, 2006;Yuan et al, 2007;Sun et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2009;Cai et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2010).…”