The landscape and loess–palaeosol section of the Shangchen Palaeolithic locality. (File photo)

The first humans in China could have come from northwest China’s Shaanxi province, after a research team led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently discovered a Palaeolithic site dating back to between 1.26 and 2.12 million years ago, Xian Fabu stated on its public WeChat account on July 12.

Yuanmou Man, who lived 1.7 million years ago, has long been regarded as the first Homo erectus found in China, but the excavated Shangchen site in Lantian area, Shaanxi province, is very likely to redefine the birth of China's earliest humans.

In addition to fossil bones, a number of artifacts used by these ancient humans including scrapers, flake tools and pointed pieces were unearthed at the site, indicating that these humans could be traced back to around 2.12 million years ago.

The leader of the research team, Zhu Zhaoyu, explained that the ancient humans discovered at the Shangchen site may have lived 270,000 years earlier than those found at the Dmanisi hominid archaeological site in Georgia, where the earliest skeletal and artefactual evidence of the genus Homo outside of Africa was found.

The world-renowned Nature Journal also published the new scientific research.