Find suggests human relatives left Africa earlier

NEW YORK—An excavation in China provides evidence that our evolutionary cousins left Africa earlier than we thought.

Stone tools suggest some unidentified relative of humans lived in China as long as 2.1 million years ago. That’s about 250,000 years earlier than the previous record for a presence of human relatives outside Africa.

Until now, the oldest evidence of human-like creatures outside Africa came from 1.8 million-year-old artifacts and skulls found in the Georgian town of Dmanisi.

The new findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The discovery, however, does not answer the longstanding question of when our own species—Homo sapiens— emerged from Africa.