​”Humans first arrived in China thousands of years earlier than thought,” writes the headline in New Scientist in lame letters. Since reading it, many other publications have picked up the information in this form. “An archaeological discovery confirms the expansion of Homo sapiens into East Asia around 45,000 years ago,” says the study published today in the journal Nature, a study co-authored by many experts from China as well as Australia and France. Which is a little different, and definitely less sensational.

What it is? This is not a recent discovery. But after completing some conclusions made since 1963, when the relevant discovery was made. In particular, a fragment of a human skull associated with more than 15,000 stone or bone artifacts. Meanwhile, 90% of them, including a fragment of the skull, have disappeared.

Essentially, the researchers dated the Shiyu site in northern China using several sediment samples, and the data indicated an age of about 45,000 years. They then confirmed that the stone industry that exists there is IUP (Initial Upper Palaeolithic), a term that was only proposed in 1988.

The opening itself is amazing. Once because it offered an extremely rich inventory, then because of the story it tells. The fact that the people who arrived in China at that time used a mixture of new techniques (bone points, points, etc.) and some whose origins can be traced back to much earlier periods (see the case of the Levallois technique) is supportive. the idea that they were among the first creators of material industries that defined the Upper Paleolithic.

Also, the fact that the obsidian they used to make certain artifacts came from a source some 1,000 kilometers away supports the idea that this was not a disparate band of horse hunters (it was a favorite game found locally) that actually did not move vast distances, but a whole network of human communities that carried out exchanges.

What is the IUP (Initial Upper Paleolithic)?

As we have already said, the term IUP appeared in 1988 at the initiative of archaeologists AE Marks and CR Ferring, when they tried to describe the stone industry present in two eastern sites (Boker-Tahtit, Israel, and Kas-Akil, Lebanon) . The interest, and therefore the difficulty of fitting them into the patterns defined at the time, was that both represented an ancient debitage technique (the Levallois technique) as well as the rich inventory characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic. It was practical, a combination of old and new techniques.

Thus, the IUP industry came to define a transition period from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, a fact also confirmed by the age of the two sites mentioned, 48,300 – 50,500 BC, respectively 41,600-40,900 BC.

Later, the term IUP came to mean all facies in the Middle East that had these features. The IUP currently identifies all industries between 35,000 and 50,000 years old that contain elements of the Levallois technique as well as the Upper Paleolithic. And with the expansion of the meaning of IUP, the number of sites where this industry exists has grown rapidly. From Europe to China.

When did Homo sapiens actually arrive in East Asia?

So far so good. But this is far from the oldest evidence of the existence of Homo sapiens in China, only the IUP industry. Which is completely different. In fact, the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens in East Asia also comes from China, from Fuyang Cave, where 47 human teeth were found, estimated to be around 80,000-120,000 years old.

The assignment of the teeth to the species Homo sapiens has not only been confirmed by several experts, but the dating seems to be beyond doubt. Specifically, the layer of calcite between which the teeth were identified was deposited between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago, respectively. This leads to the assignment of human remains to this interval.

Discoveries from the sites of Maba, Luna, Dadong, Xujiayao, Huanglong, or Jiredong, all in China, are between 70,000 and 130,000 years old, but their attribution to the species Homo sapiens remains controversial.

In Tam Pa Ling Cave in Laos, as well as in Lifa Ager Cave in Sumatra, human remains that definitely belong to our species have been identified, dated to 63,000 and 63,000 – 73,000 years, respectively. To these can be added a genetic study carried out on a 45,000-year-old human femur from Ust-Ishim, Siberia (the oldest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens in northern Asia), which proved that the individual belonged to a genetic haplogroup at least 50,000 years old, which comes from East Asia.

In summary, it should come as no surprise that a vast network of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities already existed in East Asia by 45,000 years ago. Nothing unusual. Homo sapiens has already been there for tens of thousands of years. And he came to stay.

Bibliography

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