They belong to the modern human species that lived between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago
This image provided by the journal Nature shows 47 human teeth found in the Fuyan Cave, Daoxian, in southern China. (Picture Courtesy: S Xing and X-J Wu /AFP)
Beijing: Scientists have discovered 47 human teeth in a cave in China's Hunan province, evidence that shows the earliest modern humans lived in East Asia. The teeth and a number of animal fossils were excavated from Fuyan Cave in Daoxian county. After geological dating tests and analysis, the scientists determined that the teeth belonged to Homo sapiens, the species of modern humans that lived between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago, state-run China Daily reported.
The discovery of the teeth, made between 2011 and 2013, has just been reported in the online version of the scientific journal Nature. Nick Campbell, the journal's executive editor, said, "The human teeth from China...open up a new window on an area we had little information on before. "These fossils...are approximately double or more the age of any previous well dated, well preserved human fossils from southern Asia." The first appearance of humans in the eastern Mediterranean and East Asia has remained a mystery due to lack of fossil evidence.
Human fossils found earlier in Beijing's Tianyuan Cave, Huanglong Cave in Hubei province and Zhiren Cave in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region narrowed this down to between 11,000 and 40,000 years ago, but none of these species evolved fully into modern humans. "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. "This means that we were present in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean and Europe," Liu Wu, lead author of the paper in Nature, said.
"The findings really do substantially change our understanding of how modern humans established themselves in Asia. "The findings may have some intriguing implications for the ever-evolving story of how modern humans replaced Neanderthals," Campbell said. Neanderthals were closely related to modern humans and lived between 24,000 and 130,000 years ago. They were smaller than modern humans and had low, flat elongated skulls. "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,"Maria Martinon-Torres from University College London, a co-author of the paper, said.
( Source : PTI )
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