The earliest modern Homo sapiens in China?

International audienceThe origin of modern humans continues to be one of the most heavily debated topics within paleoanthropology. Eastern Asia, and particularly China, is a geographic region that is taking on increasing importance in resolving some of these debates (Stringer, 2002; Wu, 2004; Trinkaus, 2005; Norton and Jin, 2009; Bae, 2010; Liu et al., 2010a,b). The region is growing in importance because it clearly served as the stepping off point for major human dispersals to Australasia, Japan, the Americas, and eventually Oceania (O'Connell and Allen, 2004; Goebel et al., 2008; Norton et al., 2010). Finding modern Homo sapiens (MHS) fossils from securely dated stratigraphic positions in eastern Asia can, thus, clearly contribute to knowledge of the timing and nature of the entrance of modern humans into the region. In fact, there are a number of studies documenting dated evidence for the appearance of MHS in China, suggesting they arrived between ∼70 and 130 thousands of years ago (ka) (Shen et al., 2002, 2007, 2013; Bae et al., 2014) (Table 1, Fig. 1). Nevertheless, evaluating any such claims closely is critical for developing a better understanding of the pattern of human evolution in the region. For instance, among the earlier studies, the context of the Liujiang hominin fossil has always been in question (e.g., among many papers see Norton and Jin, 2009). However, Shen et al. (2002) were very open about acknowledging this problem. Recently, Liu et al. (2015) suggested that hominin teeth with unequivocal MHS features from the newly-excavated Fuyan Cave in Hunan Province, southern China could be dated confidently to between 80 and 120 ka, making them the oldest modern human fossils in China. However, after our close reading of the Liu et al. (2015) article, a number of questions emerge regarding the geochronological and taphonomic reconstructions in the study