GENETICS × PEOPLING

The Man From Tianyuan Cave

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

A man who died at Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing, about 40,000 years ago yielded the first usable nuclear DNA from an early modern human in East Asia. His genome places him in a population already on the Asian branch, distinct from the line leading to Europeans, ancestral to many present-day Asians and Native Americans, and carrying archaic DNA in proportions comparable to mainland Asians today.

Why it matters

Tianyuan shows that by 40,000 years ago the Asian and European lines had already parted, and that they did not part in a single clean split: he shares more alleles with one 35,000-year-old European than with other ancient Europeans. The reach of his lineage is striking. Genomes from the Amur region show Tianyuan-related ancestry spread across northern East Asia before the glacial maximum, and he shares unusual affinities with some Native American groups in South America, the trace of a structure inside Asia that lasted until the peopling of the Americas.

Dating & uncertainty

The skeleton is directly radiocarbon dated to about 40,000 years. The genetic statements rest on the mitochondrial genome, chromosome 21 and thousands of nuclear positions recovered by hybridization capture, an approach developed for this specimen and reused across ancient DNA work since.

Sources

1. Fu et al. (2013), PNAS · DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, Chinadoi:10.1073/pnas.1221359110
2. Yang et al. (2017), Current Biology · 40,000-year-old individual from Asia provides insight into early population structure in Eurasiadoi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.030
3. Mao et al. (2021), Cell · The deep population history of northern East Asia from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocenedoi:10.1016/j.cell.2021.04.040

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