New age of the Dingcun 54:100 hominin site in northern China

Abstract

The Dingcun locality 54:100 site was first excavated in 1950 s and has since yielded abundant stone artefacts and the famous ‘Dingcun human’ fossils, including three teeth and a parietal fragment. The Dingcun teeth has been regarded as a potential evidence of early emergence and development of ‘modern’ anatomic characters, making them key to understanding the origin and evolution of our species. However, there has been considerable debate regarding the chronology of the Dingcun site. Here we establish a new chronology for the site, based on optical dating of the fossil-bearing sediments and U-series dating of fauna fossils from the cultural layers. Our study shows that the age of the Dingcun human fossil ranges from 298,000 to 225,000 years ago (at 95.4 % confidence interval). This new dating result suggest that the Dingcun hominins represent a Late Middle Pleistocene population in East Asia who had borne some modern dental traits.