China finds 100,000-year-old human skull: report

BEIJING (AFP) — An almost complete human skull dating back
80,000 to 100,000 years has been unearthed in central China,
state media reported Wednesday.

The skull, consisting of 16 pieces, was dug up last month after two
years of excavation at a site in Xuchang in Henan province, the
China Daily said.

The pieces were fossilised because they were buried near the
mouth of a spring whose water had a high calcium content, the
report said.

The People's Daily newspaper said the skull was expected to
provide "direct evidence" concerning the origins of human beings
in east Asia, as very few human fossils dating back to about
100,000 years ago had ever been found outside Africa.

The China Daily said that the skull, with protruding bones over
the eye sockets and a small forehead, was "the greatest discovery
in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skulls were
found in Beijing early last century".

However, experts contacted by AFP said the importance of
the discovery appeared to be over-stated in the reports.

"It is far from the greatest judging from points such as the
completeness, the time, and the significance of problems it can
explain," said Wu Xinzhi, a professor and academician at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"So far, it just can prove that there were human beings living in
Henan about 80,000 to 100,000 years ago and the shape of their
heads was roughly what the skull shows."

Besides the skull, more than 30,000 animal fossils and stone and
bone artifacts were found over the past two years in an area of
260 square metres (2,800 square feet), the report said.

The oldest human fossil found in China so far was a tooth
unearthed in 1965 in Yuanmou county in the southwestern
province of Yunnan that dated back 1.7 million years, said Wu.

Source:

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