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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: Grampa Dave
And it will never end, Grampa Dave. People are sometimes very obtuse.
61 posted on 01/04/2003 6:38:35 PM PST by Marysecretary
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To: crystalk
Perhaps you should take this discussion to Rael. My time here is finished.
62 posted on 01/04/2003 8:41:09 PM PST by stanz
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To: Right Wing Professor; blam
Re: Toba

If Toba is the cause of the bottleneck, how come only the genes of humans bottlenecked? No other primate has such a bottleneck. Two chimps from different groups living on the SAME MOUNTIAN in Africa have more genetic diversity than any two human beings alive.

Did it grealty reduce the human population, but not the chimp, bonobo, gorilla, or orangutan, or gibbon populations? That makes no sense to me at all. Two of those live EXCLUSIVLEY in Toba's neighborhood. Why do they not show a bottleneck?

If Toba ia the answer, why are only humans, among all primates, showing it?
63 posted on 01/04/2003 9:06:56 PM PST by Ahban
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To: Ahban
"If Toba ia the answer, why are only humans, among all primates, showing it?"

Don't know. What do you think.

64 posted on 01/04/2003 9:33:53 PM PST by blam
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To: PoisedWoman
Excellent information!
65 posted on 01/04/2003 9:43:37 PM PST by Bernard Marx
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To: blam
Hi blam.

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.

66 posted on 01/04/2003 10:23:18 PM PST by Light Speed
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To: Light Speed
If the Homo Sapien skull from China is this advanced..it would also reveal a strong DNA mapping.

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.

67 posted on 01/05/2003 12:03:01 AM PST by Aracelis
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To: Ahban
I don't know either, except that maybe Toba, bad as it was, did not bring any primate species alive today close to extinction. Human genes are so close simply because man himself is very recent- after Toba. Of course, if the dating of the fossil in your post holds up, mankind would be older.

Still, that skull looks completely modern - I suspect it is far more recent than the preliminary dating, based on sediments and not the skull itself, suggests. BTW Mungo Man may not be from so far back after all. VadeRetro, to his credit since it undermined his point, found a good link casting grave doubts on the 60K date for Mungo Man in favor of a much more recent date.
68 posted on 01/05/2003 8:48:06 AM PST by Ahban
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To: blam
my #68 is meant for you....
69 posted on 01/05/2003 8:49:16 AM PST by Ahban
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To: Piltdown_Woman
Yes you are correct on your comment concerning DNA....
poor wording choice on my part.
From my perspective..if the skull is like ours..and is near the time window they are forwarding...and unless man had some problem procreating...human population numerics would be much like ours...hence mankind would have probably been into the habitation phase much earlier than the 15,000 yr window which we are discovering today.
I suspect catastrophism to be the prime mover in keeping population numbers down..and driving man into migrations.
70 posted on 01/05/2003 9:27:28 AM PST by Light Speed
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To: Light Speed
human population numerics would be much like ours

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.

71 posted on 01/05/2003 11:03:10 AM PST by Aracelis
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To: CobaltBlue; Physicist
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.

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.

72 posted on 01/05/2003 11:18:49 AM PST by Aracelis
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To: JudyB1938
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.

I hope you are following your dream now and working on that degree.

73 posted on 01/05/2003 11:25:27 AM PST by Aracelis
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To: Piltdown_Woman; blam
I am almost 65 years old. To be really effective in the field requires years. I don't have them left. Plus I have a problem now remembering details. But that's okay. I asked Jesus to give me an "instant rerun" when I get to Heaven. LOL

In the meantime, I have blam. :0)
74 posted on 01/05/2003 11:42:58 AM PST by JudyB1938
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To: JudyB1938
"In the meantime, I have blam. :0)"

GULP!

75 posted on 01/05/2003 12:51:22 PM PST by blam
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To: Ahban
"I don't know either, except that maybe Toba, bad as it was, did not bring any primate species alive today close to extinction. "

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.

76 posted on 01/05/2003 12:56:12 PM PST by blam
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To: CobaltBlue
mitochondrial DNA..

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.

77 posted on 01/05/2003 1:08:20 PM PST by Little Bill
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To: blam; FairOpinion; Ernest_at_the_Beach; StayAt HomeMother; 24Karet; 3AngelaD; ...
Blast from the Past.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest
-- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

78 posted on 05/01/2005 9:19:04 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (FR profiled updated Monday, April 11, 2005. Fewer graphics, faster loading.)
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To: blam

YEC INTREP


79 posted on 05/01/2005 9:24:06 PM PDT by LiteKeeper (The radical secularization of America is happening)
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To: Wudan Master

Ping.


80 posted on 05/02/2005 7:43:53 AM PDT by blam
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