GENETICS × PEOPLING
The Tianyuan Man
~40,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial
A man buried near Beijing about 40,000 years ago gave the first usable nuclear genome of an early modern human in East Asia.
The Tianyuan man designates an individual whose remains were recovered in 2003 in Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing, and whose genome, published in 2013, constitutes the first usable nuclear DNA obtained from an early modern human in East Asia. Analysis relates him to a population already differentiated on the Asian branch, distinct from the lineage leading to Europeans, ancestral to many present-day Asian and Native American populations, and carrying archaic DNA in proportions comparable to those of present-day mainland Asian populations.
Why it matters
The genome establishes that by 40,000 years ago the divergence between the Asian and European lineages had already occurred, without reducing to a single separation: the individual shares more alleles with one European dated to 35,000 years than with other ancient Europeans. Genomes from the Amur region document a related ancestry widespread across northern East Asia before the last glacial maximum, and particular affinities link him to certain Native American groups in South America, indicating an internal structure within Asia predating the peopling of the Americas.
Dating & uncertainty
The skeleton is directly radiocarbon dated to about 40,000 years. The genetic conclusions rest on the mitochondrial genome, chromosome 21 and several thousand nuclear positions, obtained by hybridization capture. The procedure conditions the result: in a bone of this age, human DNA represents only a minute fraction of the preserved material, most of it deriving from micro-organisms that colonised the tissue, and short synthetic probes complementary to human sequences allow these to be isolated before sequencing. The method, developed for this specimen, has since been adopted across ancient DNA studies.
Our species’ history as one day
20:57:083 h 3 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day