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China's earliest modern human |
| TheAllINeed.com |
(NC&T/WUSTL) The research result was published in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on April 3.
Erik Trinkaus, Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, his colleague Hong Shang, and others at the IVPP examined the skeleton, recovered in 2003 from the Tianyuan Cave, Zhoukoudian, near Beijing City.
The skeleton dates to 42,000 to 38,500 years ago, making it the oldest securely dated modern human skeleton in China and one of the oldest modern human fossils in eastern Eurasia.
The specimen is basically a modern human, but it does have a few archaic characteristics, particularly in the teeth and hand bone. This morphological pattern implies that a simple spread of modern humans from Africa is unlikely, especially since younger specimens have been found in Eastern Eurasia with similar feature patterns.
 | | A mandible from a 40,000-year-old early modern human skeleton found in China and being studied by Erik Trinkaus Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences. (Photo: WUSTL) |
According to Trinkaus and Shang, "the discovery promises to provide relevant paleontological data for our understanding of the emergence of modern humans in eastern Asia."
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| Quotes | Figures wont lie, but liars will figure. General Charles H. Grosvenor.
He thought the formula for water was H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O (H-to-O).
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