Teeth from a cave in south
China show that Homo sapiens reached
China around 100,000 years ago—a time at which most researchers had assumed
that our species had not trekked far beyond Africa.
Recent excavations of a cave
system there extending over 3 square kilometres discovered 47 human teeth, as
well as dozens of other animal species. The researchers found no stone tools;
it is likely that humans never lived in the cave and their remains were instead
hauled in by predators.
The teeth are unquestionably
those of H. sapiens. The team report their results in Nature today. Determining the age of the
teeth proved tricky. They contained no radioactive carbon (which has almost
vanished after 50,000 years). So the team dated various calcite deposits in the
cave and used the assortment of animal remains to deduce that the human teeth
were probably between 80,000 and 120,000 years old.
Early trekkers
Those ages buck the conventional wisdom that H. sapiens from Africa
began colonizing the world only around 50,000–60,000 years ago. But many
researchers had argued that those remains were only evidence of unsuccessful
efforts at wider migration.
Without DNA from the teeth, it
is impossible to determine the relationship between the Daoxian people and
other humans, including present-day Asians.
Other genetic evidence sugests
that present-day East Asians descend from humans who interbred with
Neanderthals in western Asia some 55,000–60,000 years ago. It is also not clear
why modern humans would have reached East Asia so long before they reached
Europe, where the earliest remains are about 45,000 years old. The frigid
climate of Ice Age Europe may have erected another barrier to people adapted to
Africa.
Although there´s a lot more
work that needs to be done, this great discovery will surely change the common
idea of the incapability of the early humans to adapt to new environments.
Read more at: http://www.nature.com/news/teeth-from-china-reveal-early-human-trek-out-of-africa-1.18566
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