GENETICS × PEOPLING

The Man From Tianyuan Cave

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

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

Why it matters

Tianyuan proves that by 40,000 years ago the great fork in the non-African family tree, Europe one way, Asia the other, had already happened. His lineage's reach is startling: genomes along the Amur River show Tianyuan-related ancestry spread across northern East Asia before the glacial maximum, and he shares peculiar affinities with some South Americans, a trace of structure that crossed into the New World.

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