WASHINGTON: A set of 47 human teeth have been dated as at least 80,000 years old — perhaps even older, changing scientists ideas of ancient migration. Most researchers believe humans only left Africa for the first time around 60,000 years ago. And even then, they were thought to trek to Europe first, not Asia.
The teeth, described in a paper published Wednesday in Nature, were found in a cave in China’s Hunan province, and bear a close resemblance to those seen in modern humans. The researchers believe they’re undoubtedly those of Homo sapiens.
“This is stunning, it’s major league,” Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research, told Nature. “It’s one of the most important finds coming out of Asia in the last decade.”
The researchers believe this may be a sign that humans were ready to leave the nest long before they trekked into Europe. It’s possible that Neanderthals, who were in Europe at the time the owners of these teeth were in China, were in the way of a westward migration.
“The coincidence between the arrival of Homo sapiens to Europe and the Neanderthal extinction has often been interpreted as evidence of the superiority of modern humans,” co-author Maria Martinon-Torres of the National Centre on Human Evolution in Spain told Discovery News. “However, we now wonder that if modern humans were already present in southern China more than 80,000 years ago, why were they not capable of entering Europe until 45,000 years ago? Maybe because Neanderthals were there, it was not easy to take over ‘their’ land.”
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