Another possibility is that some of the Chinese fossils, including the Dali skull, represent the mysterious Denisovans, a species identified from Siberian fossils that are more than 40, years old. Palaeontologists don't know what the Denisovans looked like, but studies of DNA recovered from their teeth and bones indicate that this ancient population contributed to the genomes of modern humans , especially Australian Aborigines, Papua New Guineans and Polynesians — suggesting that Denisovans might have roamed Asia.
She worked with IVPP researchers on an analysis, published last year, of a fossil assemblage uncovered at Xujiayao in Hebei province — including partial jaws and nine teeth dated to ,—, years ago.
The molar teeth are massive, with very robust roots and complex grooves, reminiscent of those from Denisovans, she says. A third idea is even more radical. That work and more recent interpretations of fossil skulls suggest that Eurasian hominins evolved separately from African ones for a long stretch of time.
The researchers propose that the first hominins that left Africa 1. Their descendants mostly settled in the Middle East, where the climate was favourable, and then produced waves of transitional hominins that spread elsewhere. One Eurasian group went to Indonesia, another gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and a third ventured back into Africa and evolved into H.
In this model, modern humans evolved in Africa, but their immediate ancestor originated in the Middle East. Not everybody is convinced. But DNA from Eurasian fossils dating to the start of the human race could help to reveal which story — or combination — is correct. China is now making a push in that direction. One of her immediate goals is to see whether some of the Chinese fossils belong to the mysterious Denisovan group.
The prominent molar teeth from Xujiayao will be an early target. Despite the different interpretations of the Chinese fossil record, everybody agrees that the evolutionary tale in Asia is much more interesting than people appreciated before. But the details remain fuzzy, because so few researchers have excavated in Asia. When they have, the results have been startling. In , a dig on Flores island in Indonesia turned up a diminutive hominin, which researchers named Homo floresiensis and dubbed the hobbit.
With its odd assortment of features, the creature still provokes debate about whether it is a dwarfed form of H. Last month, more surprises emerged from Flores, where researchers found the remains of a hobbit-like hominin in rocks about , years old. Recovering more fossils from all parts of Asia will clearly help to fill in the gaps. Many palaeoanthropologists also call for better access to existing materials.
Most Chinese fossils — including some of the finest specimens, such as the Yunxian and Dali skulls — are accessible only to a handful of Chinese palaeontologists and their collaborators. Moreover, fossil sites should be dated much more rigorously, preferably by multiple methods, researchers say. But all agree that Asia — the largest continent on Earth — has a lot more to offer in terms of unravelling the human story.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 12, Jane Qiu is an award-winning science writer based in Beijing. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Shortly after this we evacuated the area, went back to Tientsin, and then back to the United States with the First Marine Division colors.
Marine base where Bowen was stationed. The area is now an industrial hub with numerous warehouses. National Geographic has pictures of what the area looks like today. Berger and his colleagues did not excavate the area. The area is expected to undergo a large redevelopment sometime soon. And, Berger and his colleagues say, local officials at the Cultural Heritage Office have agreed to monitor any excavations in case the bones turn up.
Erin Wayman is a science and human evolution blogger for Hominid Hunting. She has M. As in biological anthropology and science writing. According to Lacouperie, the ancestors of the Chinese are the Babylonians.
These intellectuals were fascinated by this Western-created theory of a Western origin for the Chinese, a seeming contradiction given their staunch cultural conservatism because it boosted their ethnic and racial confidence: we were descendants of the white race while the ruling Manchu were barbarians.
Now, the Chinese believe that their ancestor is independent and native. Leaving the answer to the question of the AOC vs. However, some of them have gone even further. This divergence also cuts through the Chinese party-state—while its scientific authorities acknowledge the AOC theory as mainstream science and the state benefits from AOC-related scientific achievements, its propaganda and education agencies continue to propagate the COC theory for patriotic education and nationalist mobilization, directed by the top leadership.
Davidson Black, the leading anthropologist and chief administrator of the Zhoukoudian site in the early s from whom Peking Man took its name, was so devoted to the job that he ignored the heart condition he was born with and died on site while working on the fossils Jia , p. The word is dodged for its mitigating effect on patriotic sentiment aroused by Peking Man.
The general reader attempting to make sense of the debate may understand it first as a disciplinary one, perhaps reflecting a dichotomy between diachronic and synchronic approaches followed by anthropologists and geneticists, respectively.
Second, the evidence confirming the survival of the descendants of H. There is also no substantial evidence yet to prove a mixing between African-origin H. It could exist. Third, and this is most important, even if the two types of data—or any type of fossil evidence critically challenging the DNA- based AOC—should be found, 10 these ancients cannot be called Chinese or the ancestor of any particular ethnic or national group.
The vestige of their activity was not Chinese civilization. The question of whether and how scientific facts about the human body—living or fossilized, in the form of physical appearance or coded in our DNA—can be used in constructing human social identity as well as narrating the historical transformation of such an identity is not unique to China.
Also, a specific science may be used to either challenge or defend an existing perception about such an identity. Genetics in China challenged Stalinist interpretation of biological evolution in the form of Lysenkoism in the past, and now it undermines racial nationalism. Elsewhere, however, it has a recorded history of being exploited by state-sponsored racism in the twentieth century, and as Wailoo and others have shown, the science is still being manipulated to suit the political agendas of nation states and ethnic groups.
It has been a fundamental assumption of some Israeli historical narratives that contemporary Jews are the direct and pure descendants of an original Hebrew people from ancient Palestine. Genetics in the twentieth century and genome studies in recent decades have been used by this discourse as scientific evidence attesting to that history. Nevertheless, technical difficulties and uncertainties unsolved by the discourse aside, especially regarding how to identify Jews who is and who is not under different historical circumstances, Abu El-Haj argues that DNA analysis cannot be directly converted into an identity construct.
The barrier between historically formed human consciousness and human bodily facts is epistemological. Abu El-Haj effectively shows how the Israeli discourse has played with genetic data, leaving behind unanswered questions reflecting ambiguity, elusiveness, and an ever-shifting emphasis caused by ignoring such a barrier. Her analysis on the problematic use of genetics in Israeli nationalism therefore provides a comparative perspective as well as a methodological tool in the critique of the use of paleoanthropological science by Chinese nationalism Abu El-Haj The discourse on a pure ancestry, an ancestral home, a natural bond between this ancestor and the environment, and most of all, a narrative that attributes a remarkable lineal continuity to physical, mental, intellectual, and even moral traits unique to this ancestor and its posterity, support fanatical racial nationalisms.
The efforts to construct racial uniqueness through finding an H. The fake human fossils heartened the British imperialist pride that had been hurt by the type specimen of —perceived as the earliest human in Europe and discovered several years earlier in Germany, the chief rival to British imperialism at the time.
By comparison, however, Piltdown Man as a scientific hoax that accommodated a nationalist agenda is significantly dwarfed by Japanese Man in many ways. In the early s, Fujimura Shinichi, an amateur archaeologist, excavated many Paleolithic stone artifacts in Miyagi prefecture and subsequently many other places as well.
As the dating of the findings kept rolling back from fifty thousand years to five hundred thousand years ago, the biological sketch of an H. Japanese Man therefore claimed for the nation a prominent place in the history of human evolution. Japanese Man stood to challenge conventional thinking about the intellectual and mental faculty of H.
Compared with Piltdown Man, Japanese Man was much more dubious even at first glance to bear scientific scrutiny. No human fossils were found, only tools and some material culture remains were found, and all the discoveries were made by Fujimura and his team.
There was a distinct lack of cross-examination of artefacts by rigorous peer reviews, and contemporary scientific dating and authentication methods.
Why was such a charlatan able to fool Japanese academia and society so quickly, so easily, and for so long fortunately the international anthropological community never took Japanese Man seriously? Wai-Ming Ng, a Japan specialist in Hong Kong, provides a more critical analysis on the relationship between the saga of Japanese Man and Japanese nationalism.
It is noteworthy that the scientific scandal came at the time when Japanese nationalism, especially its right wing, was on the rise as national confidence was regained after two decades of post-war economic miracles that amazed the world. The last point, that local government exploited the tourist value of Japanese Man, was similar to the one behind the promotion of Peking Man and Yuanmou Man in China, but such a mundane motive only testifies to a new, consumerist form of discourses of race.
By comparison, Piltdown Man is still an anthropological species but Japanese Man is a national ancestor that directly led to the rewriting of the history of the origin of Japanese people and civilization.
All of these traits were connected to the characteristics of Japanese civilization. It is this link that lends racial implications to the nationalist agenda of Japanese Man. Some Chinese COC scholars were very interested in the discovery of Japanese Man, as it might have supported their theory in their eyes.
Huang is a very active researcher and popular science writer. However, the political appropriation of the COC theory shows that some classical and prototypical racial thinking persists with little alteration. A moral portrait of such a creature is also implied. These echo the Chinese discourse of ancestral genius, implied in the comprehensive behavior model, and praise of ancestral valor and virtue in anthropological and artistic languages. For Olender, the discourse represented efforts to rehabilitate Olender , p.
While these discourses involve a relatively recent time in which human civilizations had begun, the Chinese discourse dates back at least half a million years, sunken deep into pre-human natural history.
The nationalist interpretation of the COC theory cannot be dismissed as a wild ramification of an already zealous and insular nationalism embraced only by a handful of hardcore, out of touch conservatives with its influence being inflated by social media. Cultural continuity has been transformed into racial genealogy. A Chinese identity finds its ultimate origin not only in an H.
In China, concerns and debates emerged over possible gene outflow to the West and even alleged gene weapons particularly devised to sap the Chinese nation. Chinese geneticists explained that what they shared with foreigners were not samples of saliva or blood but just certain categories of selected data drawn from these samples.
However, this concern still persists and is dramatized in popular culture. See Chapter Yasuhiro Nakasone, the Japanese Prime Minister with an attitude of rightist nationalism, visited the Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni in , which was the first such official visit since the end of World War Two. The Chinese government criticized the visit. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.
Discourses of Race and Rising China. Published online Feb 7. Yinghong Cheng 3. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Yinghong Cheng, Email: ude. Corresponding author.
This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. An Academic Debate with Political Discretion This Chinese debate constitutes part of the international discussion on the impact that DNA studies have had on unsettled issues in many fields, especially those related to history and identity Wailoo et al.
According to anthropologist Gao Xing in a IVPP annual research review, [A]ncient humans in China as well as East Asia had maintained continuity and stability in behaviour and technology throughout the entire Paleolithic and early Neolithic ages, developed a pattern of unique and gradual evolution with a characteristic of inheritance over innovation, and there had not been replacement and interruption.
As a result, the function of the body being kept warm by hairs was replaced and led to its gradual loss, Therefore we can come to the conclusion that the race of the least hairy is the race of the evolutionarily most advanced. Li continued, So we can come to the conclusion that [among human races] the less protruding the buttock, the earlier upright walking started.
As evolution developed, humans gradually learned to use language to exchange information, and the primitive function of glands gradually degenerated with the olfactory grand being a typical example, Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that, as far as the olfactory gland [among different race groups] is concerned, the less remaining, the earlier the evolution.
Footnotes 1 Unlike the names of other famous sites of primitive human habitats, such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, or those found in China, which derive from the names of the immediate localities of the discovery, Davidson Black, a Canadian anatomist and physical anthropologist who supervised and authenticated the discovery in , named the fossils , popularly known as Peking Man, despite the fact that the site is about fifty kilometres from metropolitan Peking.
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