It looks a lot like those Asian erectus may in fact have just been denisovans the whole time.
Which raises the question of what the other erectus were, if we need to take a look at the asian and african samples and start reclassifying them. Along with questions about Asian erectus, I'm curious to know how much oh9 really clusters with other african erectus samples.
Very happy fossils found decades ago are providing us new data even now.
I do think this is likely correct to a first approximation.
There is a caveat. Some of the East Asian erectus sites are older than our best estimate of the Denisovan-Neanderthal split (around 700,000 years ago). Yunxian is one such site (assuming the most recent date estimates around 600,000 years are wrong), Gongwangling another. Maybe the oldest material from Zhoukoudian, although there I wonder about the dates more.
One possibility is that some of this material may actually be Homo antecessor or an antecessor relative. Another is that there really is an East Asian - Indonesian connection in the Early Pleistocene, Homo erectus.
That interesting Yunxian skull (recently dated to 1.76mya) seems to look denisovanish as per Chris Stringer sans being a denisovan.
What if we opened the door to "this is what a lot of hominins simply looked like before divergences, denisovans and a few others conserved much of the look, neanderthals and sapiens diverged a lot". Not too different from the out of africa sapiens mostly diverging quite a lot from the general african phenotype, but not always. The look especially diverged at the advent of agriculture but even then, some groups preserved it.
Or perhaps instead it was a "reservoir" that denisovans pulled from existed prior to the divergence of sapiens and neandersovans. Enough simply got preserved in their lineage while vanishing in neanderthals and sapiens.
I am really curious about this, that extreme 3.7mya signal in some melanesians either directly into them, into denisovans they merged with (or both?) and all of the ghost/potential ghosts we're starting to uncover. I think no one has yet aggregated all of the putative ghost lineages, merges and splits into one paper yet although some are more strongly established than others.
"One possibility is that some of this material may actually be Homo antecessor or an antecessor relative."
Extremely fascinating for us to go back past the big three (sapiens, neandertals, denisovans) and just find another different, more mysterious set. Can't wait for the next year of this blog!
Very kind, thanks! I do have some notes on Yunxian. Your idea that this may just be the ancestral form prior to divergences is also what I am thinking. There are quite a number of traits where people observe that Denisovans are more like modern humans than like Neanderthals. These are mostly cases where the "modern" morphology is actually the ancestral form, and we have not known because we don't have many ancestral fossils. The proximal radius traits in the new work are examples of this.
It looks a lot like those Asian erectus may in fact have just been denisovans the whole time.
Which raises the question of what the other erectus were, if we need to take a look at the asian and african samples and start reclassifying them. Along with questions about Asian erectus, I'm curious to know how much oh9 really clusters with other african erectus samples.
Very happy fossils found decades ago are providing us new data even now.
I do think this is likely correct to a first approximation.
There is a caveat. Some of the East Asian erectus sites are older than our best estimate of the Denisovan-Neanderthal split (around 700,000 years ago). Yunxian is one such site (assuming the most recent date estimates around 600,000 years are wrong), Gongwangling another. Maybe the oldest material from Zhoukoudian, although there I wonder about the dates more.
One possibility is that some of this material may actually be Homo antecessor or an antecessor relative. Another is that there really is an East Asian - Indonesian connection in the Early Pleistocene, Homo erectus.
That interesting Yunxian skull (recently dated to 1.76mya) seems to look denisovanish as per Chris Stringer sans being a denisovan.
What if we opened the door to "this is what a lot of hominins simply looked like before divergences, denisovans and a few others conserved much of the look, neanderthals and sapiens diverged a lot". Not too different from the out of africa sapiens mostly diverging quite a lot from the general african phenotype, but not always. The look especially diverged at the advent of agriculture but even then, some groups preserved it.
Or perhaps instead it was a "reservoir" that denisovans pulled from existed prior to the divergence of sapiens and neandersovans. Enough simply got preserved in their lineage while vanishing in neanderthals and sapiens.
I am really curious about this, that extreme 3.7mya signal in some melanesians either directly into them, into denisovans they merged with (or both?) and all of the ghost/potential ghosts we're starting to uncover. I think no one has yet aggregated all of the putative ghost lineages, merges and splits into one paper yet although some are more strongly established than others.
"One possibility is that some of this material may actually be Homo antecessor or an antecessor relative."
Extremely fascinating for us to go back past the big three (sapiens, neandertals, denisovans) and just find another different, more mysterious set. Can't wait for the next year of this blog!
Very kind, thanks! I do have some notes on Yunxian. Your idea that this may just be the ancestral form prior to divergences is also what I am thinking. There are quite a number of traits where people observe that Denisovans are more like modern humans than like Neanderthals. These are mostly cases where the "modern" morphology is actually the ancestral form, and we have not known because we don't have many ancestral fossils. The proximal radius traits in the new work are examples of this.