A new continent for human evolution

Early modern: A collection of 47 human teeth discovered at Daoxian is anatomically modern yet surprisingly old. (Photo: S. Xing and X-J. Wu.) Peking Man, a skull discovered near Beijing in 1929, is one of the widely known fossils of our hominin relatives, but has so far led a lonely life in a culde-sac of our evolutionary tree, now dated to around 780,000 years ago. Early movers like Homo heidelbergensis spread into Europe and Asia, but the history of humanity happened elsewhere, as our own lineage only arose much later, in Africa. The current standard model of human evolution posits that the ancestors of today’s non-African populations left the continent some 60,000 years ago and spread into Europe and Asia, with a small amount of interbreeding on the way. This led to the fractions of Neanderthal DNA detectable in all nonAfricans and Denisovan DNA found in some parts of Asia and Oceania (Curr. Biol. (2014) 24, R295–R298). However, this view may still be biased by the fact that human and hominin remains are better preserved and more easily accessed in some regions than in others. Underappreciated regions like China may still change the story. Although researchers in China never had much luck with attempts to trace a line from Peking Man to the current Chinese population, recent discoveries may yet add interesting complexity to the evolution and migration of humans in Asia.