U-series Dating of Ganqian Cave in Guangxi and Its Anthropological Implications

From Ganqian (Tubo) Cave a total of 17 hominid teeth attributed to late Homo sapiens has been collected along with an abundance of mammalian fossils. The fossiliferous deposits are bracketed by the capping and second flowstone layers, which yielded 230 Th/ 234 U dates of ～93 and ～220 ka, marking the minimum and maximum age of the hominid teeth respectively. Two U series methods performed on two mammalian teeth gave dates in the range of 85 and 139 ka, lending support to the stratigraphic order of the depositional sequence. The results presented in this paper point to an occurrence of modern Homo sapiens in southern China much earlier than has been thought, which is supported by the dating of nearby Liujiang and Bailiandong hominid sites. Taken together, these data suggest that China should not be considered as a backwater in recent human evolution where all the previous populations were replaced.