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.
Don't know. What do you think.
Intersting article...some of the links from others on the thread good aswell.
Hypothesis:
If the Homo Sapien skull from China is this advanced..it would also reveal a strong DNA mapping.
If the skull is like ours..then the rest of the system..is like ours...
Therefore..the ability to procreate successfully.
In the supposition..then mankind should have been populating the planet in numbers that would stagger our imagination...or..they were cut back.
I can nod to the Skull from China with the dating..but then I need some system introducing itself in intervals to snuff manout...cut him back to low number thresholds.
Both of us agree on the mechanics of catastrophism.
If this skull is on..and is DNA sound ..matches us..then this planet has been rocked by Catrastrophism to a scale we can't imagine..because millions would have to be getting obliterated...in continuing cycles.
The other concern is habitation...they have some going back 15,000...a few.
Again..if left to a gradual curve without catastrophism..man would have been doing the habitation thingy much earlier than 15,000..and we would have numerous sites..globally.
If the skull is on...then so must the catastrophism.
The article doesn't say, but I suspect that there isn't any DNA left in this find. Typically, bone that is buried becomes a fossil by mineral replacement of the original structure. (Some of the most beautiful fossils I have seen were opalized - that is, silica-rich groundwaters percolated through the sediments and replaced the original calcium with opal) The best we can probably hope for is age-dating the fossils and the sediments in which they were found.
That certainly might have happened, except that the average life-span may have only been into the early to mid-twenties due to disease, etc. Still, that amount of time might have been sufficient for each female to produce 5 or 6 offspring.
I tend to agree with Physicist...that humans could have migrated very far within a relatively short period of time. Mitochondrial evidence does indeed support African roots, but let's see what further investigation reveals.
I hope you are following your dream now and working on that degree.
GULP!
Everyone is fussing about Mungo Man.
I caught parts of a documentary about an archaeologist who claims to have found 'human activity' (In the Indonesian area) just above the Toba layer. She speculated that there were human survivors in the immediate Toba area. We need more data.
The premis assumes that man originated in Africa, I was disgusted with the theory when I read about it in The Scientific American. This is another tautolgy.
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