14 DAY TRIAL // An international team of researchers working at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, discovered parts of human remains at Zhirendong (Zhiren Cave) in South China, back in 2007, and it seems these are the earliest evidence of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World, some over 100,000 years ago.
The two molars and an anterior mandible discovered by this team, which included a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, have completely changed the anthropologists' perceptions on modern humans, and on the processes of their establishment in eastern Eurasia.
These fossils are at least 100,000 years old, they belong to the initial Late Pleistocene period, and represent the oldest evidence of modern humans in eastern Asia, at least 60,000 years earlier than modern humans previously known in the region.
Eric Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of physical anthropology, said that “these fossils are helping to redefine our perceptions of modern human emergence in eastern Eurasia, and across the Old World more generally.”
The Zhirendong fossils are quite unique as they have a mixture of archaic and modern characteristics, that are in contrast with those of earlier modern humans in east Africa and southwest Asia.
The researchers concluded that this means there was some kind of human population continuity in Asia, with the appearance of modern humans.
The age and the morphology of the Zhiren Cave human fossils suggest that the biological emergence scenario of the modern human in East Asia, involved the assimilation or the continuity of the population.
It also looks like, biologically, modern humans preceded by far the cultural and technological innovations of the Upper Paleolithic era, and the early modern humans co-existed for thousands of years with the late archaic humans across Eurasia.
This research was published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.