© Xiu-Jie WuTwo partial skulls (shown here in a digital reconstruction) of an early human were discovered at an archaeological site (shown here) in Xuchang in central China.
These new fossils suggest that far-flung groups of ancient humans were more genetically linked across Eurasia than often previously thought, researchers in the new study said.
"I don't like to think of these fossils as those of hybrids," said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "Hybridization implies that all of these groups were separate and discrete, only occasionally interacting. What these fossils show is that these groups were basically not separate. The idea that there were separate lineages in different parts of the world is increasingly contradicted by the evidence we are unearthing."
Modern humans first appeared in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and recent archaeological and genetic findings suggest that
modern humans first migrated out of Africa starting at least 100,000 years ago.
However, a number of earlier groups of so-called archaic humans left Africa beforehand; for instance,
Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia between about 200,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The fragmentary nature of the human fossil record has made it tricky to determine the biology of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia, Trinkaus said. Unearthing details from this region could shed light on an otherwise poorly understood aspect of
human evolution, yielding insights into how modern and archaic humans interacted, he added.
Comment: That the Bilderberg group would seek to have someone like Allen Dulles as one of its members is quite telling about the nature of this organization, and what types of goals it would seek to accomplish. See also: