Maybe they finally found Dong Jingwei.
New "Dragon Man" human species may be our closest relative
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'Dragon man' fossil may replace Neanderthals as our closest relative
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Comment: This is another strike against the ONLY-Out-of-Africa theory. This guy is another derivative of Homo Erectus, (related to Dali Man, and partly to Denisovans). Homo Erectus and these derivations continued to exist across Asia while Neandertals were evolving from Homo Heidelbergensis, in Europe, who evolved from Erectus. Heidelbergensis is said to also be the ancestor of Homo Sapiens, wich spread throughout Africa, Europe and Asia. However, the three Asian derivatives mentioned above, (including Dragon Man), certainly also contributed to the evolution and preponderance of Sapiens. Neandertals, twice removed from Erectus, further intermixed with northern Sapiens, some of whom later went INTO Africa and distributed some genetic influences there, especially in Northern Africa.
So, the whole, linear, Out-of-Africa theory is seriously out of touch. It is based on two assumptions: The fortuitous very old finds in the Great Rift Valley meant that the very old hominids initially emerged ONLY in Africa; and, Since modern Homo Sapiens clearly migrated out of Africa from about 30,000-120,000+ years ago, then ALL modern humans must have migrated out of Africa. That's just wrong. There was a very strong presence of Erectus in Asia for millions of years extending, in fact, up until about 14,000 years ago in SE Asia. From that population, Eastern humans arose, while in the West, Western humans arose, and so on. But,. more than this, there was constant interaction between these derivatives. So, human evolution is not even a tree, with branches merging later on. It's a multifactoral, open field, with all sorts of changes going on. FROM Wiki, on Dali -
Some anthropologists, notably many Chinese representatives, cite the characteristics of the Dali cranium and other similar Chinese fossils of that era as evidence for genetic continuity in modern H. sapiens today, arguing that Dali's traits are commonly found in modern Chinese H. sapiens populations. In turn, it was argued that modern Chinese humans did not evolve in Africa, but instead evolved in China from a separate lineage of H. erectus.[12] This position would be consistent with the "Multiregional hypothesis," which states that different human populations across the planet had evolved with current racial characteristics in separate environments, and is contrary to the popular "Recent single-origin hypothesis," which asserts that modern H. sapiens evolved solely in Africa and spread throughout the planet during a recent exodus. But it has also been suggested that Dali man, if determined to belong to Homo sapiens, may represent an earlier expansion of archaic H. sapiens out of Africa predating the later more successful expansion ancestral to modern non-African populations.[13]
Reposted from madman101 at DreamWidth.