In a study published March 3 in Science, paleontologists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators report two early Late Pleistocene (from 105,000 to 125,000-year-old) crania excavated from Lingjing, Xuchang, central China’s Henan province which exhibit a morphological mosaic with differences from and similarities to their western contemporaries.

The unique physical characteristics of fossil human skulls excavated from Xuchang suggest that humans in East Asia shared long-term trends in human adaptive biology. They also indicate regional continuity and the existence of interconnections between populations during the Late Pleistocene.

Giving detailed fossil morphological characteristics and stratigraphic data, the study provides fossil evidence concerning the pattern of human morphological evolution of archaic humans in North China in the Late Pleistocene, another breakthrough made by Chinese paleontologists in the research of human evolution.

Figure 1: Two early Late Pleistocene crania–No 1 (R) and No 2 (L)–unearthed in Lingjing, Xuchang, central China’s Henan province. (Photo/Wu Xiujie)

Figure 2: Top view of a Late Pleistocene archaic human cranium (R) from Xuchang, as compared to a Homo erectus (L) and an early modern human (C). (Photo/Wu Xiujie)

Source: CAS