Researchers have sequenced and analyzed the genome of a Late Pleistocene hominin from Red Deer Cave located in Southwest China, which was previously reported possessing mosaic features of modern and archaic hominins. Their results indicate that the individual from Red Deer Cave is an anatomically modern human who exhibits genetic continuity to present day populations and is linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry that contributed to First Americans.
The mysterious hominin from Red Deer Cave belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans. Image credit: Xueping Ji.
In 1989, a team of Chinese archaeologists unearthed the remains of at least three individuals in Red Deer Cave, or Maludong, in China’s Yunnan province.
Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from the Late Pleistocene about 14,000 years ago, a period of time when modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.
Among the fossils was a hominin skull cap with mosaic features of modern and archaic hominins. The shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, and its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans.
As a result, some anthropologists had thought the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.
“Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool,” said Dr. Bing Su, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology.
“It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features.”
In the new study, Dr. Su and colleagues successfully extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from the Red Deer Cave skull and compared it to that of people from around the world.
They found that the fossil belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans.
Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago.
They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.
“Genomic sequencing shows that the hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans whose surviving decedents are now found in East Asia, the Indo-China peninsula, and Southeast Asia islands,” the authors said.
“The finding also shows that during the Late Pleistocene, hominins living in southern East Asia had rich genetic and morphologic diversity, the degree of which is greater than that in northern East Asia during the same period.”
“It suggests that early humans who first arrived in eastern Asia had initially settled in the south before some of them moved to the north.”
The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
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Xiaoming Zhang et al. A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China. Current Biology, published online July 14, 2022; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.016
