[LINK] "Evidence of earliest modern humans outside Africa found in China"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC carries the Thomson-Reuters article describing the discovery, in a southern Chinese cave, of evidence of an early migration by Homo sapiens into China long before the species made it to Europe.

A trove of 47 fossil human teeth from a cave in southern China is rewriting the history of the early migration of our species out of Africa, indicating Homo sapiens trekked into Asia far earlier than previously known and much earlier than into Europe.

Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of teeth between 80,000 and 120,000 years old that they say provide the earliest evidence of fully modern humans outside Africa.

The teeth from the Fuyan Cave site in Hunan Province's Daoxian County place our species in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean or Europe.

"Until now, the majority of the scientific community thought that Homo sapiens was not present in Asia before 50,000 years ago," said paleoanthropologist Wu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Our species first appeared in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, then spread to other parts of the world, but the timing and location of these migrations has been unclear.