Notable: The enamel-dentine junction of surviving Zhoukoudian teeth
Notable paper: Zanolli, C., Pan, L., Dumoncel, J., Kullmer, O., Kundrat, M., Liu, W., … & Tuniz, C. (2018). Inner tooth morphology of Homo erectus from ...
All posts tagged with China
Reinforcing the antiquity of hominins in China
In Nature yesterday, Zhaoyu Zhu and collaborators published a paper describing the paleomag chronology of Shangchen, a site in Lantian county, China. The old...
Some cool bone tools from an ancient Chinese site
Today’s reminder that stone tools are not all that matter in human behavior: “Discovery of circa 115,000-year-old bone retouchers at Lingjing, Henan, China”.
Link: Legendary Bronze Age Chinese flood
Annalee Newitz describes a study in Science that examines a semi-legendary flood at the dawn of Chinese civilization, which turns out to have been a real eve...
An archaic human from the bed of the Taiwan Strait
From the bottom of the sea this week comes another new fossil hominin. The specimen is a partial mandible, described in Nature Communications, by Chun-Hsiang...
The hominin invasion of China
Earlier this month, Scientific Reports included an article by Hong Ao and colleagues reporting a date for the Shangshazui archaeological locality in the Nihe...
Mailbag: North and South China
I read with interest your post on: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/pigmentation/neandertal-introgression-1000-genomes-style-2011.html
Panda gestion
Here’s a story that showed up in my feed this morning: “Prehistoric man ate panda, claims scientist”.
Real cave people
The LA Times has an interesting article about modern cave life in Shaanxi: “In China, millions make themselves at home in caves”.
Neandertal introgression, 1000 Genomes style
For our project to understand pigmentation genetics in archaic humans, we had to find a good comparative sample of sequence data from recent humans. The orig...
Asian Homo erectus
Homo erectus entered Asia as early as 1.8 million years ago. One of the earliest specimens of the species is the Modjokerto skull, from Java. The spread of t...
Mailbag: Denisovan in China and New World habitation
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?”
The diet of Gigantopithecus
Gigantopithecus has often been described as a bamboo eater, based on analogy with another kind of large herbivore in China, the giant panda. Giant pandas hav...
Meet Gigantopithecus
Gigantopithecus blacki was, as its name implies, a gigantic ape from the Pleistocene of China. Its remains consist only of teeth and jaws, but these are of a...
Denisovan DNA in the islands, and an Australian genome
David Reich and colleagues today report on the persistence of Denisova-like ancestry in island Southeast Asia and Australia (citation not yet available). Mea...
Open every box
Fascinating: “Unique Canine Tooth from ‘Peking Man’ Found in Swedish Museum Collection”
Europe and China have different Neandertal genes
When last we saw the Vi 33.16 X chromosome, I was wresting out its secrets by looking for SNP haplotypes shared by this Neandertal with the European and Afri...
Mailbag: Chinese subspecies and Denisovans
Re: Denisova:
Zhirendong puts the chin in China
A 100,000-year-old modern human from China? That’s the claim made by Liu and colleagues Liu:Zhirendong:2010, who report on a mandible and isolated teeth from...
Quote: Boyd on New World pigmentation clines
I’m using some statistics out of William Boyd’s 1956 printing of Genetics and the Races of ManBoyd:1956. It gives a good accounting of blood group data known...
Migration thinking
Murray Cox and Michael Hammer have a short commentary piece in the current BMC Biology, titled, “A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small” ...
More on Tibet, demography and selection
My post about the Tibetan high altitude selection story last Friday summarized the research and included some criticism of the demographic model applied in t...
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast?
Did the altitude of the Tibetan plateau lead to the fastest instance of human adaptation yet known?
Pigment controller OCA2
Razib: “OCA2 makes East Asians white and Europeans blue.”He discusses a study out of Esteban Parra’s lab in PLoS Genetics (open access), which characterizes ...
It came from Guangxi
Science journalist Richard Stone writes in the current Science about new Late Pleistocene skeletal remains from Guangxi: “Signs of Early Homo sapiens in Chin...
Zhoukoudian cave site in danger of collapse
From China Daily:
The mystery ape from Longgupo
In last week’s Nature, Russell Ciochon has a remarkable essay: