New Late Pleistocene age for the Homo sapiens skeleton from Liujiang southern China
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Xing, S
Grün, R
Deng, C
Jiang, Y
Jiang, T
Yang, S
Zhao, K
Gao, X
Yang, H
Guo, Z
Petraglia, MD
Shao, Q
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The emergence of Homo sapiens in Eastern Asia is a topic of significant research interest. However, well-preserved human fossils in secure, dateable contexts in this region are extremely rare, and often the subject of intense debate owing to stratigraphic and geochronological problems. Tongtianyan cave, in Liujiang District of Liuzhou City, southern China is one of the most important fossils finds of H. sapiens, though its age has been debated, with chronometric dates ranging from the late Middle Pleistocene to the early Late Pleistocene. Here we provide new age estimates and revised provenience information for the Liujiang human fossils, which represent one of the most complete fossil skeletons of H. sapiens in China. U-series dating on the human fossils and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating on the fossil-bearing sediments provided ages ranging from ~33,000 to 23,000 years ago (ka). The revised age estimates correspond with the dates of other human fossils in northern China, at Tianyuan Cave (~40.8–38.1 ka) and Zhoukoudian Upper Cave (39.0–36.3 ka), indicating the geographically widespread presence of H. sapiens across Eastern Asia in the Late Pleistocene, which is significant for better understanding human dispersals and adaptations in the region.
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Nature Communications
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15
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1
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© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Anthropology
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Ge, J; Xing, S; Grün, R; Deng, C; Jiang, Y; Jiang, T; Yang, S; Zhao, K; Gao, X; Yang, H; Guo, Z; Petraglia, MD; Shao, Q, New Late Pleistocene age for the Homo sapiens skeleton from Liujiang southern China, Nature Communications, 2024, 15 (1), pp. 3611-