~105,000- to 125,000-year-old archaic human crania from Xuchang, China shows incipient mongoloid and Neanderthal traits - may be Denisovans.
Zhan-Yang Li et al.: Two early Late Pleistocene crania from Lingjing, Xuchang, China, exhibit a morphological mosaic with differences from and similarities to their western contemporaries. They share pan–Old World trends in encephalization and in supraorbital, neurocranial vault, and nuchal gracilization. They reflect eastern Eurasian ancestry in having low, sagittally flat, and inferiorly broad neurocrania. They share occipital (suprainiac and nuchal torus) and temporal labyrinthine (semicircular canal) morphology with the Neandertals. This morphological combination reflects Pleistocene human evolutionary patterns in general biology, as well as both regional continuity and interregional population dynamics.
The ~260,000bp incipient "mongoloid" Jinniushan from northern China - a corner stone in Peter Klevius' published theory on human evolution since 1992.
Klevius question in his 1992 book was twofold:1 How come that there was a "mongoloid" big brained skull in northern China two ice age cycles before present, yet nothing really happened before ~50,000bp?
2 How come that the oldest modern Africans are "mongoloids" - but much younger in Africa than the China fossils?
Add to this the remarkable Liujiang from China (see below).
Both fossils show clear cold adaptation (mongoloid) traits. However, Jinniushan (right) is older and has a bigger cranial capacity although it's female.
In Demand for Resources (1992:28 ISBN 9173288411) in a chapter about human evolution, Peter Klevius used only one example, the remarkable Jinniushan skeleton/cranium:
In northern China near North Korean border an almost complete skeleton of a young man who died 280,000 years ago. The skeleton was remarkable because its big cranial volume (1,400cc) was not expected in Homo erectus territory at this early time and even if classified as Homo sapiens it was still big. The anatomically completely modern human brain volume is 1,400 cc and appeared between 50-100,000 years ago. One may therefore conclude that big brain volume by far predated more sophisticated human behavior (Klevius 1992:28).
Today, when many believe the skeleton is female, the brain size becomes even more remarkable.
However, today, after the revelation of Homo floresiensis, there's a clear candidate to answering Klevius questions above: tropical island dwarfed brain, and its genetic spread up to the previously dumb but big skulled (to compensate for some of their dumbness) northerners. When these genes met the result was an explosion of intelligence in some of the northerners.
Klevius wrote:
Thursday, March 15, 2012 (with some random updates)
The Red Deer Cave people add more evidence for Klevius’ ape/homo hybridization theory
The irrefutable art track in Northern Eurasia (see map below) has no contemporary equivalent in other parts of the world. Based on what we know now it had no fore bearers whatsoever in any period of time. Moreover, it seems that there was even a decline before "civilizations" started tens of thousands of years later! Yet Klevius seems to be the only one addressing this most interesting (besides genetics) fact! According to Klevius (and no one else so far) the new and more efficient brain evolved in a jungle environment (SE Asia?) and spread up until meeting with big headed Neanderthals hence creating the modern human who later spread and dissolved with archaic homos. In this process Homo erectus was most probably involved as well.
Updated info about the origin of Klevius' theory
Keep in mind that mainland SE Asia possibly harbored physically truly modern humans already before the time range (12,000/18,000 ybp - 98,000 ybp) of the Homo floresiensis remains in the Flores cave.
Liujiang, SE China (est. 100,000-140,000ybp)
If this Liujiang skull had been found in Africa or Mideast Wikipedia and other media would be overfilled. But this is all you get now (summer 2015 update) from Wikipedia about this extremely important skull:
The Liujiang skull probably came from sediment dating to 111 000 to 139 000 which would mean it's older than the oldest Homo floresiensis remains on Flores. Nothing even remotely close to this modern skull has ever been found in Africa, Mideast or Europe this early. In other words, we have the extremely archaic looking Red Deer Cave people 100,000 years after this extremely modern looking Liujiang population at approximately the same region. Even the least probable estimate of 70,000 bp would make Liujiang more modern looking than anything else.
Also compare Lake Mungo remains in Australia with an mtDNA that differs completely from ours (incl. Australian Aborigines). Sadly the remains have been kept out of further research because of stupid* "Aboriginal"(?!) greed (for the purpose of making certain people more "special" than others for no good reason at all (also compare the ridiculous Kennewick man controversy). Does it need to be said that the Mungo remains are as far from Australian Aborigines in appearance as you can imagine. However, according to Alan Thorne, 'Mungo could not have come from Africa as, just like Aboriginal Australians don't look like anybody from Africa, Mungo Man's skeleton doesn't look like anybody from Africa either. LM3 skeleton was of a gracile individual, estimated stature of 196 cm, which all sharply contrast with the morphology of modern indigenous Australians. Compared to the older Liujiang skull Mungo man had a much smaller brain.
* There's no way anyone can state who was "first" in Australia - and even if there was, then there's still no way of making any meaningful connection to now living people.
Updated map
Most "mysteries" in genetics disappear by abandoning OOA and changing direction of HSS evolution. Only South East Asia offered a combination of tropical island/mainland fluctuations needed to put pressure on size reduction paired with evolutionary isolation in an environment where only those survived who managed to shrink their heads while keeping the same intelligence as their mainland kins with some double the sized brain. Homo floresiensis is evidence that such has happened there.
Denisovan is an extinct species of human in the genus Homo. In March 2010, scientists announced the discovery of a finger bone fragment of a juvenile female who lived about 41,000 years ago, found in the remote Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, a cave which has also been inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans. Two teeth and a toe bone belonging to different members of the same population have since been reported.
Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Denisovan finger bone showed it to be genetically distinct from the mtDNAs of Neanderthals and modern humans. Subsequent study of the nuclear genome from this specimen suggests that this group shares a common origin with Neanderthals, that they ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia, and that they lived among and interbred with the ancestors of some present-day modern humans, with about 3% to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians deriving from Denisovans. DNA discovered in Spain suggests that Denisovans at some point resided in Western Europe, where Neanderthals were thought to be the only inhabitants. A comparison with the genome of a Neanderthal from the same cave revealed significant local interbreeding, with local Neanderthal DNA representing 17% of the Denisovan genome, while evidence was also detected of interbreeding with an as yet unidentified ancient human lineage. Similar analysis of a toe bone discovered in 2011 is underway, while analysis of DNA from two teeth found in layers different from the finger bone revealed an unexpected degree of mtDNA divergence among Denisovans. In 2013, mitochondrial DNA from a 400,000-year-old hominin femur bone from Spain, which had been seen as either Neanderthal or Homo heidelbergensis, was found to be closer to Denisovan mtDNA than to Neanderthal mtDNA.
Little is known of the precise anatomical features of the Denisovans, since the only physical remains discovered thus far are the finger bone, two teeth from which genetic material has been gathered and a toe bone. The single finger bone is unusually broad and robust, well outside the variation seen in modern people. Surprisingly, it belonged to a female, indicating that the Denisovans were extremely robust, perhaps similar in build to the Neanderthals. The tooth that has been characterized shares no derived morphological features with Neanderthal or modern humans. An initial morphological characterization of the toe bone led to the suggestion that it may have belonged to a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid individual, although a critic suggested that the morphology was inconclusive. This toe bone's DNA was analyzed by Pääbo. After looking at the full genome, Pääbo and others confirmed that humans produced hybrids with Denisovans.
Some older finds may or may not belong to the Denisovan line. These includes the skulls from Dali and Maba, and a number of more fragmentary remains from Asia. Asia is not well mapped with regard to human evolution, and the above finds may represent a group of "Asian Neanderthals".
Jinniushan and Floresiensis - the keys to Denisovan and the truly modern humans
Jinniushan had a bigger brain than anything in contemporary Africa
In Demand for Resources (1992:28 ISBN 9173288411) in a chapter about human evolution, Peter Klevius used only one example, the remarkable Jinniushan skeleton/cranium:
In northern China near North Korean border an almost complete skeleton of a young man who died 280,000 years ago. The skeleton was remarkable because its big cranial volume (1,400cc) was not expected in Homo erectus territory at this early time and even if classified as Homo sapiens it was still big. The anatomically completely modern human brain volume is 1,400 cc and appeared between 50-100,000 years ago. One may therefore conclude that big brain volume by far predated more sophisticated human behavior (Klevius 1992:28).
Today, when many believe the skeleton is female, the brain size becomes even more remarkable.
Since 1991 when Klevius wrote his book much new information has been produced. However, it seems that the Jinniushan archaic Homo sapiens still constitutes the most spectacular anomaly (together with Homo floresiensis) in anthropology. So why did Klevius pick Jinniushan instead of one of the more fashionable human remains? After all, Klevius was a big fan of Rchard Leakey (he even interviewed him in a lengthy program for the Finnish YLE broadcasting company) and there was a lot of exciting bones appearing from the Rift Valley.
In the 1980s Klevius paid special attention to Australian aborigines and African "bushmen" and noted that the latter were mongoloid in appearance (even more so considering that todays Khoe-San/Khoisan are heavily mixed with Bantu speakers). But mongoloid features are due to cold adaptation in the north and therefore the "bushmen" had to be related to Eurasia. Klevius soon realized that the Khoisan speakers had moved to the southern Africa quite recently as a consequence of the so called Bantu expansion. More studies indicated that the "bushmen" had previously populated most of east Africa up to the Red Sea and beyond.
So the next step for Klevius was to search for early big skulled human remains in the mongoloid northern part of Eurasia. And that search really paid off.
This happened more than 20 years before the discovery of the Denisova bracelet and the human relative Denisovan in Altai.
Klevius book Demand for Resources (1992) in which these thoughts about mongoloid traits were published also predates Floresiensis with more than a decade.
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