Ancient Chinese Teeth Rewrites Human Migration History

In a Chinese cave system, almost four dozen ancient teeth were found, dating back to about 80,000 years. This is a stunning discovery, because it was found to go back to two thousand decades earlier than the estimated time when Homo sapiens were believed to have left Africa to emigrate to other parts of the world.

"The 47 teeth were found in a cave in Daoxian, in China's Hunan province, and are the strongest proof yet that modern humans first migrated from Africa to Asia 80,000 to 120,000 years ago," reports CNN.

Hence, archaeologists are relooking at the theory that humans migrated to Europe and Asia about 50 to 70 thousand years ago, according to Examiner.

Interestingly, the teeth are small but have flat crowns and thin roots just like humans today. They were found inside the Fuyan limestone caves in Daoxian County in Hunan. Other skeletons of hyenas, extinct giant pandas and other animal species are alternative discoveries, but no tools or signs of civilization seem to be existing in the caves. Hence, the speculation is that predators "dragged the human remains inside".

According to the Oct 14 issue of Nature, in which the article was published, there was no radioactive carbon dating available, so the excavation teams "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."

"This is stunning, it's major league," commented University of Oxford archaeologist Michael Petraglia. "It's one of the most important finds coming out of Asia in the last decade."

"This is a rock-solid case for having early humans - definitely Homo sapiens - at an early date in eastern Asia," he said.

Strangely, some cavities, which are uncommon in human teeth that are older than 50,000 years have been found in the teeth. "It could be that early modern humans had a peculiar diet in tropical Asia," commented palaeo-anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. "But I am pretty sure that this observation will raise some eyebrows."

Currently, scientists are busy conducting DNA tests on these teeth, so that more insights can be gained on them.