A discovery of 47 human teeth from the Fuyan Cave in the Chinese province of Hunan indicates that anatomically modern Homo sapiens were present in southern Asia at least 80,000 years ago – well before the species came to Europe.
Upper (left) and lower teeth of anatomically modern Homo sapiens from the Fuyan Cave. Image credit: Wu Liu et al.
The discovery was announced in the journal Nature on October 14, 2015.
“This is a milestone discovery because the species we found in the Fuyuan Cave is from well developed modern humans, almost identical to living humans,” said Dr Liu Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, lead author of the discovery paper.
“This means that we were present in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean and Europe.”
The hominid record from southern Asia during the Late Pleistocene (from 126,000 to 12,000 years ago) is scarce. Well-preserved Homo sapiens fossils that are older than 45,000 years have been lacking.
Recent intensive excavations in the Fuyan Cave – a limestone cave located in Tangbei Village, Daoxian County, Hunan Province, southern China – yielded a collection of human teeth and fossils from various extinct and living mammals.
Dr Liu and his colleagues from the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, China and the United States, report that the teeth date to more than 80,000 years old, although they may be as old as 120,000 years, and that the detailed morphological analysis supports their attribution to anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
According to the scientists, it is the oldest find of anatomically modern Homo sapiens outside of Africa.
The discovery also indicates that humans with fully modern morphological features were present in southern Asia 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean and Europe.
In addition, the results suggest that southern China may have been inhabited by more derived populations than central and northern China during this period.
“Now we know that modern humans were present in southern China as early as 80,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that our species entered Europe before 45,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were already extinct,” said co-author Dr Maria Martinon-Torres of University College London, UK.
The scientists also suggest that the presence of Neanderthals and other hominids in the North of Asia put a halt to the spread of modern humans.
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Wu Liu et al. The earliest unequivocally modern humans in southern China. Nature, published online October 14, 2015; doi: 10.1038/nature15696
