First modern humans in China

The teeth were found from the Fuyan Cave site in Hunan Province’s Daoxian County.

“What was a big surprise was the date”, said Maria Martinon-Torres from University College London, co-author of the study published in Nature.

Petraglia, who was not involved in the research, has previously argued that modern humans spread into Asia prior to the Toba super-eruption on the island of Sumatra a few 74,000 years ago, which a few think devastated human populations in the region at the time. Well-preserved Homo sapiens fossils that are older than 45,000 years have been lacking.

The teeth are at least 80,000 years old and may date back to 120,000 years ago.

The research, conducted by Chinese and foreign institutes since 2010, was led by Liu Wu and Wu Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as well as Cai Yanjun from the CAS’s Institute of Earth Environment.

Researchers said that although their research has yet to explore where the people in Daoxian were from, and if they had originated in China or Africa, they tend to believe they had evolved from ancient humans who were local to the area, suggesting human evolution did not take place all at one time.

“Our data fill a chronological and geographical gap that is relevant for understanding when H. sapiens first appeared in southern Asia”, the study said.

Dr. Martinon-Torres said that if the finding is compared on dental anatomy level then no difference will be found. Teeth were able to survive owing to their hard enamel coating. The change in estimates is due to 47 fossilized human teeth found in a South China cave, the discovery of which was announced to the public yesterday.

Robin Dennell from the University of Exeter has unveiled that warmer climate of Asia might have made it an interesting destination for early settlers.

Dr Martinon-Torres also suggested that there might have been “different movements and migrations” out of Africa, not just one. “Did they vanish? Could they be the ancestors of later and current populations that entered Europe?”. 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. That is, until the discovery of human teeth in Fuyuan Cave.

A few fossils of modern humans that predate the Out of Africa migration are already known, from the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel. “So we started a five-year excavation”.