Jinniushan Hominin and Modern human Origins

摘要

Models of modern human origins have generally been tested in the western part of the Old World (Europe, the Levant and Africa) where the fossil and archaeological record is best known. Both replacement and multiregional models recognize that the evidence shows that modern humans evolved in Africa. They differ in whether modern humans evolved ONLY in Africa and then spread out to replace indigenous populations of archaic humans (Replacement or Out of Africa Model), or whether they evolved throughout the range of human habitation with gene flow between regions (Multiregional Evolution model). It follows, then, that to test these models, we should look outside the continent of Africa, especially at the geographic edges of the human range. In general, the attention of scholars investigating this issue has focused on the western edge of the human range in Europe, but these hypotheses can also be tested at the eastern edge, in East Asia. In this paper we discuss a human fossil at the other extreme edge of the Pleistocene range of human habitation in far northeastern China.