1. Late Pleistocene archaic human crania from Xuchang, China
- Author
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Wu Liu, Xiaomei Nian, Xing Gao, Erik Trinkaus, Liping Zhou, Zhan-Yang Li, and Xiujie Wu
- Subjects
China ,010506 paleontology ,Pleistocene ,Population ,01 natural sciences ,General biology ,Animals ,Humans ,0601 history and archaeology ,education ,Neanderthals ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,education.field_of_study ,060101 anthropology ,Multidisciplinary ,Crania ,biology ,Fossils ,Skull ,Encephalization ,06 humanities and the arts ,biology.organism_classification ,Biological Evolution ,Semicircular Canals ,Evolutionary biology ,Occipital Bone - Abstract
Morphological mosaics in early Asian humans Excavations in eastern Asia are yielding information on human evolution and migration. Li et al. analyzed two fossil human skulls from central China, dated to 100,000 to 130,000 years ago. The crania elucidate the pattern of human morphological evolution in eastern Eurasia. Some features are ancestral and similar to those of earlier eastern Eurasian humans, some are derived and shared with contemporaneous or later humans elsewhere, and some are closer to those of Neandertals. The analysis illuminates shared long-term trends in human adaptive biology and suggests the existence of interconnections between populations across Eurasia during the later Pleistocene. Science , this issue p. 969
- Published
- 2017
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