From: Terra Forming Terra
This is very encouraging. I am certain that many separated
populations arose during the Ice Age and developed most of the
distinct features associated with those regions. It just makes good
sense. On the other hand, a new influx of genes, particularly if
they are highly adaptive, would soon integrate into the indigenous
populations.
We have always tried to explain this process as one of violence in
which the losers die when it is nothing of the kind. The losers may
well die, but the breeding women are inevitably conserved. Thus a
successful adaptation inevitably finds its way everywhere.
During the past ten thousand years we have had the particular
emergence of agricultural man in several separate locations around
the world. Mere population expansion has subsumed all other local
generic material but has not expunged any of it. Such loss is
actually a rarity.
In time we will have enough data to begin the interesting task of
unraveling treads of inheritance even back to origination point.
Scientists who cracked
the provenance of Beijing bones have proved to be trailblazers in
retrieving and analysing ancient human DNA
Stephen Chen
7 February, 2013
The discovery of
ancient human bones in Tianyuan Cave, in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, 10
years ago caused a sensation. They showed Tianyuan Man died about
40,000 years ago.
It was the first time
that early human remains had been found in the area since the
discovery of Peking Man in 1920s. But Peking Man's skull and other
specimens were lost in the chaos of the Japanese invasion during the
second world war.
The remains of
Tianyuan Man consisted of more than 30 fragments, including lower jaw
and leg bones, but no skull - not enough to tell how closely the
ancient human related to present-day Chinese. Some
palaeoanthropologists were not even sure the bones belonged to a
male.
Tianyuan Man reclined
quietly in the fossil room of the Institute of Vertebrate
Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing. He was almost
forgotten until a team of Chinese and German researchers reopened the
dusty box and scrutinised the bones with the newest tools of DNA
analysis MORE.
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