A 100,000 class quondam skull from Northern China has a social organisation in its inner - ear antecedently thought to be unique to Neanderthals . While the skull is definitelyHomo Sapiens , the presence of the formation thousands of kilometers from the nearest web site known to have been colonize byHomo mousteriensissuggests human organic evolution was more complex than we pull in .
In the light source of the rethinking of anearlier stage of human evolutionand late grounds on our ancestorsbreeding with Neanderthalsit is not a total surprise to come up our appearance did not run as swimmingly as was once believed . Nevertheless , no one expected to find this feature so far east , nor even noticed it when the skull was first try 35 years ago .
" The discovery places into doubtfulness a whole suite of scenarios of later Pleistocene human population dispersals and interconnections based on tracing isolate anatomical or familial feature in fragmental fossils , " say study co - author Dr Erik Trinkaus , of Washington University , St. Louis . " It suggests , rather , that the later phase of human evolution were more of a maze of biology and people than uncomplicated lines on mapping would suggest . "
Trinkaus is along meter proponent for interbreedingbetween Neanderthals and modern humans . He made the finding while conducting a micro - CT scan on a skull found in Xujiaya , Nihewan Basisn .
" We fully expected the scan to reveal a worldly internal ear that attend much like a modern human one , but what we saw was understandably typical of a Neanderthal . This find come in into question whether this arrangement of the semicircular epithelial duct is truly unique to the Neanderthals . "
Publishing inPNAS , Trinkaus and his coauthors say , Neanderthals “ exhibit a relatively low prior channel , a relatively larger lateral one , and a more inferior place of the ulterior one congenator to the sidelong one . ”
Three other skull from the same region were prove for the bailiwick , two older than and one more recent than the Xujiayao 15 specimen that make the surprise . All three resemble modern mankind . The skull , and others from the same site and era , do not show any other Neanderthal features .
The researcher do not recollect that the discovery needs mean there was some cistron flow between Neanderthals exist in Europe and mass subsist in China at the meter . " Eastern Asia and Western Europe are a farseeing means apart , and these migration patterns took thousands of years to toy out , " enjoin Trinkaus . This study usher that you ca n’t rely on one anatomic feature or one piece of DNA as the basis for wholesale supposal about the migration of hominid specie from one seat to another . "
The paper follow , “ It raise interrogative sentence regarding possible cranial and postcranial geomorphologic correlate of Homo labyrinthine mutation , the use of goods and services of single “ Neanderthalian ” feature for document universe affinities , and the nature of late antiquated human magnetic variation across Eurasia . ”
Or as Trinkaus assign it , " The subject field of human phylogenesis has always been messy , and these findings just make it all the messier . It shows that human populations in the real domain do n’t do in nice elementary patterns . ”
