178,000 years of Chinese history? That’s really something to chew on
Discovery of three ancient human teeth in a cave in Guizhou adds piece to puzzle of Chinese origins
After removing several metres of sediment from an ancient, underground river bed deep inside a limestone cave in Bijie, Guizhou, a team of researchers led by Professor Zhao Lingxia discovered three human teeth.
Anatomically, they resembled those of modern humans, but dating of the sediment showed they were buried 112,000 to 178,000 years ago, before the first modern humans walked out of Africa, around 75,000 years ago.
There is overwhelming evidence from fossil records that China was populated with humans before the arrival of African settlers
The team’s discovery three years ago, detailed in a paper in the journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica earlier this year, added a new piece to the puzzle of Chinese origins but not the full picture, in the absence of DNA analysis.
Over the past decade, ancient human fossils have been found in almost every province in southern China, many of them from sediments dating back 100,000 years or more but with anatomical features little different to the Chinese people living today.
However, analysis of the evolutionary history of the male Y chromosome has traced the origin of all Chinese men to an “Adam” from Africa who arrived in Southeast Asia about 60,000 years ago. The thinking has been that when he and his sons moved north to what is now China, they either encountered a zone devoid of others humans or killed all they found, otherwise the modern Chinese man would have more than one father among his ancestral roots.