Tibetans Lived in Himalayas Year-Round Up to 12,600 Years Ago
By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | January 5, 2017 04:29pm ET
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Tibetans Lived in Himalayas Year-Round Up to 12,600 Years Ago
Chusang likely was a permanent settlement, as travel to and from the area would have been difficult.
Credit: Zhijun Wang
Thousands of years ago, people living on the high mountains of the Tibetan plateau waded into a steamy hot spring, leaving behind footprints in the soft mud. These footprints, which were discovered in 1998, have proved invaluable to modern-day researchers, who recently dated them to between 7,400 and 12,600 years ago.
Based on earlier analyses of other human sites, it was thought that the plateau's earliest permanent human residents had settled there no earlier than 5,200 years ago, the researchers said. But these newfound dates make the ancient Tibetan site of Chusang the oldest permanent base of people on the Tibetan plateau, they said.
http://www.livescience.com/57403-humans-inhabited-tibet-mountains-earlier-than-thought.html
