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The Dingcun locality 54:100 site was first excavated in 1950 s and has since yielded abundant stone artefacts and the famous ‘Dingcun human’ fossils, including three teeth and a parietal fragment. The Dingcun teeth has been regarded as a potential evidence of early emergence and development of ‘modern’ anatomic characters, making them key to understanding the origin and evolution of our species. However, there has been considerable debate regarding the chronology of the Dingcun site. Here we establish a new chronology for the site, based on optical dating of the fossil-bearing sediments and U-series dating of fauna fossils from the cultural layers. Our study shows that the age of the Dingcun human fossil ranges from 298,000 to 225,000 years ago (at 95.4 % confidence interval). This new dating result suggest that the Dingcun hominins represent a Late Middle Pleistocene population in East Asia who had borne some modern dental traits. ....
Guanyindong Cave is one of most important Palaeolithic sites in southwestern China, due to its presence of the earliest Levallois artifacts in East Asia, which was dated to two discrete periods at ∼160–170 thousand years ago (ka) and ∼70–80 ka, respectively, based on optical dating of the artifact-bearing sediments from the west entrance of the cave (Hu, et al., 2019a). There were five excavation pits at Guanyindong during the initial excavation seasons in 1960s, all of which have yielded abundant stone artifacts and fauna fossils. However, in contrast to the excavation pits at the west entrance whose chronology and lithic industry were intensively studied, the chronological frameworks of the excavation pits inside the cave chambers have not been established. Here we report optical dating results of sediment samples taken from two of the pits inside the cave (Profiles 2A and 3). We established Bayesian age models for the two profiles based on our new optical ages and the U-seri ....
A new archaic human species dating back 300,000 years has been found in East China. This individual has distinct features not seen in modern humans, Neanderthals, or Denisovans. ....
Scientists say a Homo sapiens fossil found in Ethiopia in the 1960s is at least 233,000 years old, which would make it 36,000 years older than the ....