New fossils are challenging ideas that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals soon after arriving from Africa.

A discovery of a child's tooth and stone tools in a cave in southern France suggests Homo sapiens was in western Europe about 54,000 years ago.

That is several thousands of years earlier than previously thought, indicating that the two species could have coexisted for long periods.

The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

The finds were discovered in a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley, by a team led by Prof Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse. He was astonished when he learned that they were evidence of an early modern human settlement.

"We are now able to demonstrate that Homo sapiens arrived 12,000 years before we expected, and this population was then replaced after that by other Neanderthal populations. And this literally rewrites all our books of history."