The Greatest Archaeological Discovery Ever? Ancient Human Fossils Rewrite Evolution

In this video, we'll be investigating some ancient fossils that have been deemed the greatest archaeological discoveries ever. It was once thought that Neanderthaloids possibly evolved from the East Asian strains of Java Man and Peking Man, and spread along the foothills of the Eurasian mountains into Europe during the lush Period. Researchers recognized a southern route along the Zagros Mountains in Iran, and extending eastwards towards Pakistan and Afghanistan. For several hundred thousand years, Neanderthals were the most modern humans in Europe. They cared for their sick, drew pictures on cave walls, controlled fire for warmth and cooking, and hunted the largest prey as an apex predator. Neanderthals were also the most widespread humans in their time, ranging from the furthest west and north of Europe to as far south as Israel and Palestine, and east into Central Asia and Siberia.

New Evidence That Neanderthals lived in East Asia and interbred with the local hominid population there around 100,000 years ago has been found by scientists in central China, according to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal ‘Science’. In fact, scientists recently described another 300,000 year old skull from central China as being “part Human-part neanderthal”. Writing in the journal ‘Science’, researchers described the Pleistocene-era skulls as having a morphological mosaic with differences from and similarities to their western contemporaries. The brow ridges and skull mass resembled early modern humans of the Old World, the skulls had a flat brainpan like other eastern Eurasian humans of the time, but their ear canals and large back section of the skull resemble Neanderthals.

Homo erectus was a type of hominin, the group to which early and modern humans belong. Homo erectus walked upright, had a thick skull with a brain a little smaller than our own and used stone tools. The first Java Man fossils of the species were found on Java Indonesia, in 1892 by Eugène Dubois. Nearly 30 years later, more Homo erectus fossils were found thousands of miles away during excavations of the Zhoukoudian cave system just outside of Beijing. The famous fossils of an early relative of modern humans commonly called Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than previously thought, a new study finds. The revised date could change the timeline and number of migrations of the Homo erectus species out of Africa and into Asia. The Homo genus, which includes modern humans, likely originated in Africa with Homo habilis about 2.5 million years ago. Homo erectus likely derived from some early version of Homo habilis around 2 million years ago, anthropologists think. It's a species that had legs, referring to the distances traveled. Aside from Homo sapiens, it's the most widespread hominin species.

SOURCES:
https://time.com/4690289/china-skulls...
https://www.nature.com/articles/129863c0
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24941998