Are Beijingers really not our ancestors?

How many years have our ancestors in China lived in this land? This is what many people want to know. After liberation, everyone who went to middle school in China knows that Beijingers are our ancestors 500,000 years ago. However, in recent two years, domestic media reported that according to the results of DNA research, the ancestors of China people migrated from Africa only about 60,000 years ago. What's going on here? Now let me give readers a brief explanation of the historical overview of this problem.

The research on various materials of Beijingers established his ancestor status in 193 1 year. 1960, Li Ji discovered homo habilis fossils of1900,000 years ago in Tanzania. 1966, he proposed that homo habilis was the ancestor of modern people, and Homo erectus, including Beijingers, was only an extinct branch of human evolution, and Beijingers were not considered as our ancestors.

Since the mid-1970s, many western scholars have tried to apply the principles of cladistics to the study of the systematic position of Homo erectus, claiming that Homo erectus, represented by Beijingers, has many unique morphological characteristics, not those of Homo sapiens, so that there is no genetic relationship between them, and Homo erectus, including Beijingers, has become extinct. However, through the study of human fossils in China, we find that the unique characteristics of so-called Homo erectus put forward by those scholars can also be seen in a few Homo sapiens fossils in China, and some morphological characteristics of so-called Homo sapiens that were not considered to exist in Homo erectus in the past can also be seen in the skulls of individual Homo erectus. Therefore, there is a mosaic relationship between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in China, and the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens is gradual transition, so we should also think that Beijingers are our ancestors.

Since 1987, many geneticists believe that the recent ancestors of modern people appeared in Africa about150,000-200,000 years ago, and their descendants came to Asia and Europe about130,000 years ago. This hypothesis is often called Eve Hypothesis by the media. 1999 a geneticist in China suggested that African immigrants arrived in China about 60,000 years ago, completely replacing the aborigines in China, and modern China people are the descendants of those immigrants. All these statements are based on indirect data obtained from very small fragments of genetic material, and the inference process contains many assumptions, so the interpretation of laboratory results inevitably has a great subjective component. In fact, other geneticists use different methods or different materials to study the origin time of modern people. The data reached 654.38+0.29 million years ago, and the data was only 654.38+0./kloc-0.00 million years. The data are so different that no one can judge which data is closer to the real situation.

Explaining the process of human evolution should mainly rely on direct evidence, namely human fossils and related relics. Human fossils have been found in more than 60 places in China. From Yuanmou and Lantian Homo erectus more than one million years ago, human beings in various periods have a series of morphological characteristics. There is a morphological mosaic between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, so it is a continuous evolution in the same strain, and Beijingers are an important part of it. Paleolithic tools made by ancient humans have been found in more than 0/000 places in China, which constitutes an obvious continuous technical tradition and belongs to Auschwitz type. On the other hand, according to Eve hypothesis, the Near East is the only place for immigrants who migrated from Africa to China about 1.3-0.6 million years ago. According to a large amount of evidence found, 654.38 million years ago, people in the Near East widely used most types of stone tools. If Eve hypothesis really suits China's situation, China's stone tools should suddenly change from Auschwitz type 60,000 years ago to Most type or more progressive type. But in fact, there is no sign of this sudden change. Therefore, both positive and negative hard evidence is not conducive to African theory or Eve hypothesis.

The origin of modern people in China is a hot topic of paleoanthropology research at present, and it is also an important content of the debate on the origin of modern people. Although the discovered human fossils are enough to establish the general outline of the human evolution scene in China, the specific details are not well understood. We can learn about small fragments of genetic material in detail, but if we want to explore the evolution process with this indirect fragment data, we need to accumulate a lot of experimental data and make detailed reasoning. At present, although there are great contradictions between the two main viewpoints on the origin of modern people, I believe that with the long-term hard work of relevant scholars, the accumulation of a large number of direct and indirect evidence and detailed research, the two understandings will certainly be able to achieve the coordination in line with the real history.