A fresh look at an archaeological site in northern China that was excavated in the 1960s has confirmed Homo sapiens was present there about 45,000 years ago
By Michael Marshall
18 January 2024
The first members of our species to reach China might have entered the region from the north
Esteban De Armas / Alamy
Modern humans were living in what is now China by 45,000 years ago. The finding means our species reached the area thousands of years earlier than generally thought, possibly via a northerly route through modern-day Siberia and Mongolia.
A team co-led by Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France re-examined an archaeological site called Shiyu in northern China. It was originally excavated in 1963 during the unrest of China’s cultural revolution. “This was not the best moment to find such an important site,” says d’Errico.
Read more
The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history
Advertisement
Shiyu is an open-air site in a river gully. It holds a 30-metre-deep deposit of sands and other sediment, which the original excavators divided into four horizontal layers, the second from bottom of which was found to hold evidence of human occupation.
The excavators found over 15,000 stone artefacts and thousands of animal bones. There was also a single piece of hominin skull, which anthropologist Woo Ru-Kang identified as a modern human .
Some of the artefacts were later transferred to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. But those left at the local facilities – including the hominin bone – were lost. “We have perhaps 10 per cent of the stone tools,” says d’Errico.