Ancient DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000
years ago in the area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day
Asians and Native Americans
An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo
and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been
extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near
Beijing, China. Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan
human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and
Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of
Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in
people living in this region nowadays.