China's Earliest Modern Human Found 163
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonized the East. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
Re:Other things interest me besides... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other things interest me besides... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Could be fake (Score:4, Informative)
Don't be an idiot - that would mean being found for sale on a dirty blanket laid out on a sidewalk outside the Lohou train station in Shenzhen. The Tianyuan Cave is a carefully protected area [people.com.cn], listed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, and monitored specifically to prohibit such funny business.
Re:Other things interest me besides... (Score:5, Informative)
Evidence suggests that early hominids migrated out of Africa in waves. Homo erectus, for example, is believed to have evolved in Africa and spread over much of Asia one or two million years ago. The general pattern of hominid evolution is one of evolution of new species in Africa followed by general dispersion over those parts of the globe accessible by foot. This pattern appears to have been repeated several times: H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis/neanderthalensis[1] and H. sapiens.
The reality of hominid evolution is that we don't know a lot. The number of fossils is small and the weight of inference they bear is heavy. As Mark Twain said, in science one gets such a huge return in speculation from such a trifling investment of fact. However, the DNA evidence points quite strongly to the evolution of modern humans in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, and the migration across the rest of the Old World about 70,000 years ago, with the settling of Australia by perfectly ordinary H. sapiens who are just like all the rest of us about 40,000 years ago. North America was colonized somewhat later, but probably not that much.
Humans are much bigger on exogamy than any other primate: we have a strong tendency to breed outside our kin group. We'll have sex with just about anything, and actually show a marked preference for those who are not perceived to be close kin. This is why the differences between races are so tiny, and restricted entirely to rapidly evolved and quite trivial enzymic variations that have high survival value in different climates. We are all multi-racial under the skin, and all have ancestors of different races far more recently in our family tree than most people appreciate (Icelanders may be exempt from this rule.)
So on the face of it, if there were multiple waves of near-modern humans migrating across the Old World, it is very likely that the members of the most recent group would have interbred with previous groups.
[1] For the racists in the audience, it might be worth contemplating that Neanderthals are the only hominid species that appears to have evolved in Europe (from H. heidelbergensis that left Africa earlier) and of all the hominids they are amongst the least successful.
Re:Other things interest me besides... (Score:3, Informative)
You are certainly not an evolutionary biologist and if your girlfriend is you certainly haven't been listening to here unless she is a student of that neanderthal Wolpert.. You don't live in Ann Arbour by any chance?
Most paleoanthopologist think that modern humans are descended from a small population in Africa that spread out and colonized the entire world displacing earlier archaic types of homo such as erectus and neanderthalensis with whom they could not interbreed. There is good genetic evidence based on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from the bones of neanderthal specimens to show that we are not the product of interbreeding with neanderthals.
The differences in appearance are a result of selective evolutionary pressures working on populations of modern humans. For example the pale pinko-grey skin of northern europeans like myself is due the lack of sunlight in these northern climes. Vitamin D is produced through the action of sunlight on cells just below our skins. Having a dark skin in Africa and othour tropical regions protects against damage from strong sunlight and the occurence of skin cancer, while enough sunlight penetrates to produce vit D.
However the first dark skinned modern humans to penetrate into the gloomy north would tend towards vit D deficiency and there would be a selective pressure towards lighter skinned individuals, able to produce enough vit d, surviving to reproduce. Nothing todo with inbreeding with archaics, simple eh?