PEOPLING
Fuyan Cave, Early Homo sapiens in China?
~100,000 years ago (debated)
Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial
Fuyan Cave, at Daoxian in Hunan, southern China, yielded 47 human teeth whose shape was assessed in 2015 as unequivocally modern, more derived than that of any other early modern human sample and close to that of people alive today. The 2015 study placed them at more than 80,000 years, with an inferred maximum age of 120,000, which would set fully modern dental anatomy in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years before its appearance in the Levant and in Europe. The age came from the flowstone capping the deposit, a sheet of calcite laid down by dripping water: a lid is younger than what it covers, so dating the lid fixes a minimum age for everything beneath. A 2021 reassessment turned the method around and dated the teeth themselves, by radiocarbon and by ancient DNA, and returned Holocene ages.
Why it matters
The dispute reaches well past one cave, because the two ages imply two different histories. Under the 2015 reading, Homo sapiens was in East Asia long before the expansion that genetics dates to between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago, and those early arrivals left no detectable trace in living genomes. Under the 2021 reading, southern China falls inside the window genetics had already fixed, and no earlier wave is needed to explain anything. The same 47 teeth thus stand as evidence either for repeated early excursions or for a single late settlement.
Dating & uncertaintyDisputed
Dating a deposit by what covers it assumes nothing has moved. The 2021 study applied ancient DNA and direct radiocarbon dating to teeth from Fuyan and from a second cave, found them Holocene, and attributed the gap to erosion, redeposition and intrusion in subtropical caves, where younger material works its way down. The original team replied that the two specimens dated in that way are of uncertain origin and identification, and questioned the quality of the analyses. Between about 120,000 and 45,000 years, the choice decides whether the peopling of East Asia has an early chapter at all.
Sources
- Liu et al. (2015), Nature · The earliest unequivocally modern humans in southern Chinadoi:10.1038/nature15696
- Sun et al. (2021), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Ancient DNA and multimethod dating confirm the late arrival of anatomically modern humans in southern Chinadoi:10.1073/pnas.2019158118
- Martinón-Torres et al. (2021), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · On the misidentification and unreliable context of the new human teeth from Fuyan Cave (China)doi:10.1073/pnas.2102961118
Our species’ history as one day
16:22:517 h 37 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day