Chinese origin of Native Americans?

More than three decades ago, a group of archaeologists from China discovered a large set of bones in a cavern known as the Red Deer Cave in the Yunnan province of southern China. Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from the Late Pleistocene, specifically about 14,000 years ago. At that time, anatomically modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.

In the cave, the researchers found a hominin skull with anatomical features typical of anatomically modern humans and others more typical of archaic humans. For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, and their brains appeared to be smaller than those of modern humans. As a result, some anthropologists thought that the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until relatively recently, or to a hybrid population of anatomically modern humans and archaic humans.

In 2018, ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the skull and genome sequenced.

Bing Su’s team, from the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution in Kunming, China, compared the genome of the skull with that of people from all over the world.

Careful analysis of the skull’s genome has allowed Su’s team to learn that the skull belonged to an individual deeply linked to the East Asian people who were ancestors of Native Americans.

Artistic recreation of the approximate aspect that one of the primitive humans of the Red Deer Cave could have had in life. (Image: Xueping Ji. CC BY-SA)

The hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of anatomically modern humans that apparently contributed significantly to the origin of Native Americans. Other surviving descendants of those humans from which Native Americans seem to derive are now found in East Asia, the Indochinese peninsula, and various islands in Southeast Asia.

Combined with data from previous research, this finding has led the team to theorize that some of the southern East Asian populations traveled north along the coast of modern-day East China via Japan and into Siberia. tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait, between Asia and North America, and became the first human group to reach and settle in America long enough.

The study is titled “A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China.” And it has been published in the academic journal Current Biology. (Font: NCYT by Amazings)