400,000-year-old teeth reveal a stunning twist in human evolution– www.sciencedaily.com
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EXCERPT:
For most of the 20th century, the model of human origins was a tree: with the trunk dividing into branches, and then twigs. Each species of human relative (hominin) was a neat, single branch.
As an undergraduate, I was taught that Homo sapiens was one of these branches that emerged in Africa, spread across the world, and displaced every archaic human it encountered.
Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and other ancient relatives were evolutionary dead ends – unfortunate cousins who left no descendants. In the 30 years since I left university, those early lessons are now radically revised.
That neat replacement story is now comprehensively wrong, largely thanks to studies like the one published in Nature by Qiaomei Fu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues. The paper achieves something that would have seemed impossible a decade ago: it recovers meaningful biological information from H. erectus fossils far too old for DNA.
Instead of genetic sequences, the team extracted ancient proteins from the enamel of six teeth from three Chinese sites – Zhoukoudian (which, in the early 20th century, produced fossil remains known as “Peking Man”), Hexian and Sunjiadong – all dating to around 400,000 years ago.
