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Native American Connection

16 July 2022
Archaeology

At https://phys.org/news/2022-07-dna-ancient-population-southern-china.html … human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China have come up with a surprise. The genetics is published in Current Biology, July 14th 2022. The site is known as the Red Deer Cave, in Yunnan Province (Ma Iudeng). Researchers compared the genome of people around the world, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. They are said to resemble a modern human species rather than an archaic species such as Neanderthals. It seems some people from SE Asia travelled north along the coastline of what is now China, through Japan, reaching Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. If they are modern humans and then this would have been during the Late Glacial Maximum, which is left unsaid in the press release. At some stage, they entered North America, although the fossil skulls are said to date back only to 14,000 years ago. This is defined as the Late Pleistocene as which ended with the Younger Dryas Event. How would these people have moved that late into the Americas? It must have occurred earlier, although evidence at the moment is lacking. Initially, the skulls were thought to exhibit similarities between Neanderthals or Denisovans, mixed with modern human traits, also not described in the abstract. Now, they are defined as a thoroughly modern human which seems to show there is still a grey area for the period between 40,000 years ago and the end of the Ice Age.

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