How old are the oldest Homo sapiens in Far East Asia?

Abstract

There is abundant genetic and paleontological evidence supporting the African origin of our species. At some point in its evolution, Homo sapiens spread out of Africa into Eurasia, replacing or partially absorbing local populations of other hominin forms. Ultimately, it colonized regions where no humans had ever lived before. Although extant humans display some physical variations resulting from adaptation to local conditions and isolation, they all share a recent African ancestry. How many times, when, and why this dispersal out of Africa occurred have been a matter of continuous debate in the field of paleoanthropology. In the past decade, research efforts have intensified in Far East Asia to elucidate the timing of the arrival of our species and have produced several notable publications. In PNAS, Sun et al. (1) question the dating of some of the foremost Chinese hominin sites that have been central to these discussions. They also raise important questions about the way the archeological and fossil records in this region can be interpreted. The initial dispersal of our species out of Africa seems to be mostly driven by environmental changes. In the course of the last half million years, our planet experienced spectacular climatic fluctuations. In Africa, contrasting with a broad trend of growing aridity, humid pulses of several millennia periodically turned large portions of the Sahara into huge surfaces of savannas crossed by a network of rivers and lakes sometimes the size of Germany. Importantly, these “green Sahara” episodes also affected the Arabian Peninsula (2), and African populations that were adapted to this type of biotope likely expanded into these newly inhabitable territories. The earliest undisputable traces of our species in Asia are found at the margin of Africa, in the southern Levant 177,000 to 194,000 y ago (3), but paleogenetics provides signals of possibly older … [↵][1]1Email: hublin{at}eva.mpg.de. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.