Ancient human teeth discovered in a cave in China suggest humans left Africa sooner than previously thought.

According to Live Science, the teeth are about 120,000 years old and indicate humans began leaving Africa as long ago as 130,000 years ago. Previous research placed that timeline at 40,000 to 70,000 years ago.

The study detailing the teeth was published in the journal Nature.

"They are indeed the earliest Homo sapiens with fully modern morphologies outside of Africa," study lead author Wu Liu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Discovery News. "At the Levant (much of the eastern Mediterranean), we also have human remains from the sites of Qafzeh and Skhul (in Israel) with similar ages, but these fossils have been described as retaining some primitive features and, thus, are not fully modern."

The researchers will also investigate how modern humans interacted with Neanderthals, as the discovery would mean modern humans waited a bit longer to get to Europe.

"Our discovery, together with other research findings, suggests southern China should be the key, central area for the emergence and evolution of modern humans in East Asia," Liu told Live Science.

Past research places the first modern humans in Africa around 200,000 years ago, but researchers are still finding out how they evolved, migrated, and lived early on.

"We've known for a long time that Europe/Siberia/North China was colonized by H. sapiens much later than southern and southeast Asia," Robin Dennell, a researchers at the University of Exeter not involved in the study, told Discovery News. "I think the main reasons here were that the Neanderthals were a long-established resident population in northern Eurasia; and sub-freezing winters were a major deterrent to an African-derived H. sapiens until long after they had crossed southern Asia."