Teeth Suggest People Left Africa Earlier Than Previously Thought

The researchers believe this may be a sign that humans were ready to leave the nest long before they trekked into Europe.

According to Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, later waves of human migration may have replaced the early settlers in Daoxian County in Hunan Province, China-where ancient teeth found. Before this, many thought that modern humans fairly quickly led to the demise of Neanderthals as they moved through Europe; but perhaps Neanderthals were a bigger block than previously believed. Martinon-Torres asked in the study.

“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.

A cave in Southern China, near the small village of Daoxian, has yielded 47 human teeth, dated between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago – the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens presence outside of Africa. This would indicate that our ancestors spread across the world much earlier than the current assumption of 50-60,000 years ago.

The teeth were so old they could not be tested using carbon dating, so scientists had to date the surrounding calcite deposits and human remains in the cave to estimate their age. This suggests different kinds of humans were living in China at the same time – archaic kinds in northern China, and ones more like modern humans in southern China.

The study detailing the teeth was published in the journal Nature.

Another impediment might have been the cold.

“It’s possible that the demise of Neanderthals had nothing to do with human superiority”, Martinon-Torres wrote in an op-ed for The Conversation. “What are the origins of these populations, and what was their fate?” “They can also provide information about diet, about pathologies suffered from these groups and about culture…” “Maybe there was more than one Out of Africa migration”. An elephant-like creature called Stegodon orientalis and a giant tapir, also present, were species that may have survived into the era when the Chinese had developed writing, a few 3,500 years ago.

The cache of teeth almost went unnoticed, Dr Wu said. “The samples are unbelievable, 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”. “So we started a five-year excavation”.