The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in a cave in China.
The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists.
Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
According to the "Out of Africa" theory, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in East Africa and then spread out across the globe about 70,000 years ago, replacing earlier, or archaic, human populations, such as the Neanderthals, with very little, if any, interbreeding.
The Tianyuan remains display diagnostic features of modern H. sapiens. But co-author Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features characteristic of earlier human species, such as relatively large front teeth.
The most likely explanation, they argue, is interbreeding between early modern humans emerging from Africa and the archaic populations they encountered in Europe and Asia.
"The pattern we see across the Old World is basically a modern human in terms of its newly emerged characteristics, but also a minority of traits that are absent or lost in the earliest modern humans in East Africa," Professor Trinkaus told the BBC News website.
"The question is where did they get them from? Either they re-evolved them, which is not very likely, or, to some degree, they interbred with archaic groups.
He added that evidence from the animal world suggested two closely related species, which have been separate for less than two million years, could interbreed successfully when given the opportunity to mate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6518527.stm
The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists.
Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
According to the "Out of Africa" theory, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in East Africa and then spread out across the globe about 70,000 years ago, replacing earlier, or archaic, human populations, such as the Neanderthals, with very little, if any, interbreeding.
The Tianyuan remains display diagnostic features of modern H. sapiens. But co-author Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features characteristic of earlier human species, such as relatively large front teeth.
The most likely explanation, they argue, is interbreeding between early modern humans emerging from Africa and the archaic populations they encountered in Europe and Asia.
"The pattern we see across the Old World is basically a modern human in terms of its newly emerged characteristics, but also a minority of traits that are absent or lost in the earliest modern humans in East Africa," Professor Trinkaus told the BBC News website.
"The question is where did they get them from? Either they re-evolved them, which is not very likely, or, to some degree, they interbred with archaic groups.
He added that evidence from the animal world suggested two closely related species, which have been separate for less than two million years, could interbreed successfully when given the opportunity to mate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6518527.stm