These 47 human teeth found from the Fuyan Cave in Hunan province show that Homo sapiens arrived in southern China at least 80,000 years ago, well before the species came to Europe.
Advertisement
“We’ve known for a long time that Europe/Siberia/North China was colonized by H. sapiens much later than southern and southeast Asia”, Robin Dennell, a researchers at the University of Exeter not involved in the study, told Discovery News.
Before this, the earliest well-dated fossils firmly linked to our species in southern Asia were only around 45,000 years old. The discovery by a research group in Daoxian contradicts the strong evidence supporting a dispersal from Africa 60,000 years ago.
The study’s lead author, paleoanthropologist Wu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, said the teeth were about twice as old as the earliest ones found in Europe.
This means that everything below those stalagmites must be older than 80,000 years old; the human teeth could be as old as 125,000 years, according to the researchers.
Modern humans first originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa.
Previous research suggested the exodus from Africa began between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago.
This latest finding was published on the Thursday edition of the journal Nature. “The samples are incredible, they are wild, they are variable and I think in the next few years we are going to have surprises because they have a lot to say not only about Asian study but about the main stories that we have been talking about (regarding) human evolution”.
The first is the intimidating presence of Neanderthal man. While this species of early human eventually died out, they were spread across the European continent up until at least a few 50,000 years ago.
“It may be that that Europe was too small for two intelligent and behaviorally complex species that were seeking the same type of resources”, study co-lead author María Martinón-Torres at University College London told Live Science.
It is also not clear whymodern humans would have reached East Asia so long before they reached Europe, where the earliest remains are about 45,000 years old.
Another impediment might have been the cold. The frigid climate of Ice Age Europe may have presented another barrier to people adapted to Africa. What is the origin of this population (of people in China)? “Did they vanish? Could they be the ancestors of later and current populations that entered Europe?” “Maybe there’s not only one (migration) out of Africa, (maybe) there are several out of Africa”.
Excavations from 2011 to 2013 yielded a trove of 47 human teeth, as well as bones from many other extinct and living animals, such as pandas, hyenas and pigs.
“The teeth are basically the same as yours and mine”, Liu said.
Advertisement
The ancient teeth are one of a slew of recent archaeological finds in Asia, which includes a feathered dinosaur fossil in China, fossilized prehistoric human jawbone in Taiwan and 50-foot dinosaur skeleton found by Chinese farmers.
