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Chinese Roots: Skull May Complicate Human-Origins Debate
Science News ^ | 12-21/28-2002 | Bruce Bower

Posted on 01/02/2003 11:03:24 AM PST by blam

Chinese Roots: Skull may complicate human-origins debate

Bruce Bower

In 1958, farm workers digging in a cave in southern China's Liujiang County discovered several human bones including a skull. Relying on its resemblance to securely dated human fossils in Japan, scientists assigned this Homo sapiens skull an age of 20,000 to 30,000 years.

ASIAN CONNECTION.

If southern China's Liujiang skull is really more than 100,000 years old, this modern Homo sapiens fossil will shake up theories of human evolution. W. Wang

However, the Liujiang finds may be much older than that, according to a report in the December Journal of Human Evolution.

The fossils probably came from sediment dating to 111,000 to 139,000 years ago, says a team led by geologist Guanjun Shen of Nanjing (China) Normal University. He and his coworkers add that it's still possible that the Liujiang discoveries came either from a cave deposit dating from around 68,000 years ago or from one dating to more than 153,000 years ago.

If any of these estimates pans out, "the Liujiang [specimen] is revealed as one of the earliest modern humans in East Asia," the team concludes. The presence of modern humans in this part of the world 100,000 years ago or more would roughly coincide with their earliest fossil dates in Africa and the Middle East.

Evidence of such ancient roots for H. sapiens in China creates problems for the influential out-of-Africa theory of human evolution, Shen's group says. That theory holds that modern humanity originated in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and then spread elsewhere, replacing other Homo species. If the Liujiang dates were confirmed, out-of-Africa adherents would need to find older African H. sapiens fossils than they now have or show that modern humans migrated extremely quickly from Africa to eastern Asia.

The new dates also suggest that other, more-primitive-looking Chinese Homo fossils that date to 150,000 to 100,000 years ago represent a lineage that coexisted with modern humans, Shen proposes.

Scientific accounts from 1959 and 1965 of the Liujiang discoveries guided the new determination of the fossils' likely burial site. Shen's team mapped various soil deposits in the cave and calculated the age of crystallized limestone samples by using the rate of uranium decay.

Uranium analyses at other sites support an ancient origin of modern humans in southern China, Shen says. H. sapiens teeth found at two other caves in this region come from sediment that his group dates to at least 94,000 years ago.

Anthropologists with divergent views about human evolution say that the new age estimate for the Liujiang skull remains preliminary. It's still uncertain how the skull got in the cave and where it was originally buried, remarks Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer, an out-of-Africa proponent, says that Shen's team members need to date either the skull itself or the calcite clinging to its surface to make their case.

Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor agrees. "I'd love for the Liujiang skull to be as old as Shen proposes, but we'll never know for sure without directly dating the specimen," Wolpoff holds. In his view, modern humanity evolved simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe over the past 2 million years.

Shen says he hopes to work out an agreement with Chinese officials in charge of the Liujiang skull to date the specimen directly.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: archaeology; china; chinese; complicate; crevolist; debate; ggg; godsgravesglyphs; guangxi; history; liujiangskull; roots; skull
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To: Right Wing Professor
Is there a way to investigate whether disease, such as a sudden appearing mutation to a before benign virus, might be responsible for certain extinction processes? Might a massive stress in the environment (like a comet/meteor strike) allow a before deadly but not extinction creating virus to wipe out species?
41 posted on 01/02/2003 5:02:39 PM PST by MHGinTN
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To: blam
Debate? What debate?

Ohhhh, I get it: They don't know about Genesis, Chapters 1-11.
42 posted on 01/02/2003 6:43:09 PM PST by BenR2
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To: jlogajan
There were many Nefertaris. The most famous one, Nefertari Mery Mut, Great Wife of Rameses II, was not Nubian by descent. She was the daughter of Bakenkhonsu, a royal official of the Theban court with ancestors in attendance for many generations. Ahmes Nefertari, daughter of Seqenenre of the 17th dynasty, became the wife of Ahmose I, founder of the 18th dynasty. She is thought to be the great-grandmother of Nefertari Mery Mut. There is no evidence that they descended from any Nubian line.
43 posted on 01/02/2003 7:22:22 PM PST by stanz
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To: stanz
That's the Nefertari I was referring to. There are many web sites out there that claim her to be a Nubian. However, the claims are not well backed up. Whether she came from Thebes or not would not automatically exclude her from being Nubian, though.
44 posted on 01/02/2003 8:35:07 PM PST by jlogajan
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To: Right Wing Professor
H. sapiens

HOMO sapiens? It's not like homo is a long word. Out of favor?

45 posted on 01/02/2003 8:45:20 PM PST by Reeses
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To: Reeses
Genera are usually abbreviated such as in H.Pylori. (Personally I like to write them out for the Boethians.)
46 posted on 01/02/2003 9:58:31 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic
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To: jlogajan; stanz; blam
Speaking of Nefertari, I think you will enjoy this website:

http://www.touregypt.net/historicalessays/nefertari.htm
47 posted on 01/03/2003 4:18:38 AM PST by JudyB1938
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To: JudyB1938
I have a bronze statue of Nefertiti that I picked up in Cairo when I was through there in the mid-60's. I'm not much interested in Egyptian archaeology these days. The action is in South America. IMO.
48 posted on 01/03/2003 7:49:36 AM PST by blam
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To: JudyB1938
Thanks. I recall that from a time last fall when I was stalking Egyptian sites looking for tomb paintings.
49 posted on 01/03/2003 8:02:52 AM PST by stanz
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To: jlogajan
I think the sources which suggest she was Nubian are Afro-centric. I recall looking at one recently which claimed the whole of ancient Egyptian genealogy was Black which is just not true. The Nubian kings ruled in the later dynasties. Also, there's this:

http://www.osirisnet.net/tombes/pharaons/nofr/e_nofr/e_nofr.htm

Ahmes-Nefertari, Amenotep l's mother, was the first to enjoy an official cult after her death because of her eminent priestly functions, and this was of course fervently continued during succeeding dynasties. Having been deified, she appears in many monuments as a black-skinned queen -a rare privilege, previously granted only to gods or deified kings. The black colour that then differentiates her from other persons of her rank seems in the event to denote sanctification : her new physical appearance was thus a tangible sign that she had arrived in the world of the divine. It was no doubt on the basis of a similar principle that the queens of the Ramesside era, in having themselves depicted in their tombs with pink skin, also wished to indicate that they were diffe- rent in nature from other women (cf view 17 from the craftman Inerkhau's tomb) Top of Page

She may have been depicted as being black-skinned, but Egyptians took great liberties with skin color in tomb paintings. Osiris was always green; royal ladies almost always yellow; later Queens of the 19th and later dynasties sometimes portrayed with pink skin; men whether royal or not always portrayed as brown-skinned....just traditional representations.

50 posted on 01/03/2003 8:14:26 AM PST by stanz
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To: Piltdown_Woman
>>However, if age-dating these finds reveals that the specimens were emplaced contemporaneously with surrounding sediments, then we will have to re-think our current theories.<<

It seems to me that all that would need to be re-thought is the assumptions about the timing of genetic variations in mitochondrial DNA.

Older human skeletons push the timeline further backwards but don't, in and of themselves, change the well-established pattern of genetic variation of mitochondrial DNA, which clearly supports a single origin traceable back to Africa.
51 posted on 01/03/2003 12:34:33 PM PST by CobaltBlue
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To: stanz
Also what is now southern Egypt was then part of Nubia. So there were many Nubian royalties in what is now Egypt. Of course we associate most of Egyptian history to the northern part.
52 posted on 01/03/2003 1:26:01 PM PST by jlogajan
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To: jlogajan
There's a good site which discusses ancient Nubia (don't be dismayed by its title, it's legit):

http://www.internetpuppets.org/afrnubia.html

If you scroll down to the time chart, you'll note that Kings from Nubia only ruled Egypt from approx. 800 BC to 650 BC which is considered "late" in ancient Egyptian civilization...much later came rule by the Persians, then later Greece and Rome, but Egypt had seen the last of her glory days by the end of the New Kingdom.

53 posted on 01/03/2003 1:42:31 PM PST by stanz
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To: Reeses
HOMO sapiens? It's not like homo is a long word. Out of favor?

No, just convention to abbreviate the generic name when you're discussing species within a single genus. I'm not Homophobic (at least not in this sense).

54 posted on 01/03/2003 1:57:52 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
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To: Right Wing Professor
That would be H. phobic, right? :-)
55 posted on 01/03/2003 6:54:44 PM PST by jlogajan
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To: blam
I wanted to be an archaeologist in Central or South America, but I wasn't allowed to go to college in 1956 because I was a girl. My mother said it'd be a waste of money.
56 posted on 01/03/2003 10:43:18 PM PST by JudyB1938
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To: JudyB1938
"My mother said it'd be a waste of money."

You should always listen to your mother. (ducking)

57 posted on 01/04/2003 9:18:24 AM PST by blam
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To: stanz
The Out of Africa idea as currently propounded, which says that as recently as some 80 to 140 thousand years ago, persons deceptively called "modern humans" came out of Africa, and took over the world, replacing any earlier members of genus Homo that might have been there before, with no very significant admixture/intermarriage with said premoderns....

While this idea might be FALSE, it is hardly one that is congenial to traditional Darwinism or evolution. Quite the contrary, it begs almost for the intervention of Celestials both to produce [by genetics] the "modern humans," and then to give them UFO rides to settlement sites worldwide!

58 posted on 01/04/2003 9:26:35 AM PST by crystalk
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To: crystalk
Celestials???????????

The theory at this time is not false or valid until more evidence comes in to either substantiate it or or not. Humans evolved. That is one thing that is certain. H. sapiens is called "modern" because it is the most evolved species of hominid around.That much is no deception.

59 posted on 01/04/2003 2:08:28 PM PST by stanz
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To: stanz
Evolved from the monkeys? Up to a point.

Then, man was monkeyed with. By whom? My answer is: the Elohim, the Celestials.

Too many ways in which man differs even from the closest animals, in ways that could not possibly be pro-survival or naturally selected, even if there were the zillions of years of time between H.erectus and us that there are NOT!

The very OOA theory itself says that in effect the whole thing leaped from Erectus to As Good As Yo Mama in about the period from 300,000 to 100,000 yrs ago.

60 posted on 01/04/2003 2:48:19 PM PST by crystalk
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