Even as hominid settlers in Europe seemed to neaten up the story of human evolution, a restless hominid in Asia threatened to turn the whole thing messy again.
In November an international team of researchers confirmed that a 1.9-million-year-old human ancestor had been found in China, making it the oldest Asian known and supporting theories that hominids made their way out of Africa not around 1 million years ago as previously thought but more than 2 million years ago. The find also cast doubt on just who those early wanderers were.
These momentous fossils aren’t much to look at: a few teeth and a fragment of jawbone. Chinese researchers discovered them several years ago, along with some very simple stone tools, in a 1.9-million-year-old layer of sediment at Longgupo (Dragon Hill) Cave in south central China. They originally thought the teeth belonged to Homo erectus, supposedly the first hominid to ...
