There may have been a previously unknown human lineage that lived in northern East Asia during the Ice Age.
Traces found at the Donghulin archaeological site in Beijing suggest the existence of a human lineage until now unknown that it inhabited the north of East Asia.
This discreet branch of humanity was identified after researchers analyzed ancient DNA of individuals who lived at the end of the last Ice Age, at a time when the world was slowly beginning to take on new contours.
was recently published in the magazine Current Biology.
One of these individuals was a woman who lived about 11 thousand years ago. He belonged to this hitherto unknown lineage, who will have separated from other populations around 19 thousand years ago.
They weren’t exactly newcomers. adapting to a changing climate, but rather long-established societies who managed to resist this transformation.
They thrived for thousands of years in one of the more hostile environments that the Earth has known for as long as human beings have existed. And they survived to help us understand what life was like when the world transitioned from an immense tundra to a more habitable space.
A second individual, a man who lived about 9,500 years agohad a genetic profile closer to that of later Neolithic agricultural populations in northern China. At that time, the migrations and cultural exchanges were already underway, note a.
Taken together, this pair of ancestral individuals suggests that northern East Asia did not undergo population replacement sudden, as happened in parts of Europe. Instead, went through a prolonged transitionduring which older lineages coexisted with ascending groups, adopting new tools, new food regimes and, later, agriculture.
The site brings together a feature setsuch as pottery, long-lasting dwellings, and early signs of millet cultivation, which suggests that these lost lineages were not exclusively hunter-gatherers.
This makes the chronology a little more complexbut it also helps to clarify it, by showing several overlapping human populations, making important discoveries at different rates.
It makes sense. After all, as you’ve probably heard the coach of your favorite football team say in one of the usual post-game press conferences, the progress is not linear. And this is as true in football as it is in the evolution of the human species over thousands of years.
