Hominins with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 y ago.
That is the opening line of an abstract from Fu, et al. (2013) detailing ancient DNA from ~40,000 year old fossil human remains in China. The paper, which was teased yesterday in the press, is up today at PNAS and is likely to generate lots of discussion. Before all that begins, I just wanted to point out how refreshing it is to see a 40,000 year old fossil described the way they do in the opening line. The number of publications that describe fossils affiliated with living humans, but existing tens of thousands of years in the past, as “modern humans” is more than I could possibly ever count (and yes, I know the very next line in the abstract refers to these specimens as “early modern humans”). It might be more cumbersome, but the description above is more accurate and a worthwhile change in the paleoanthropological lexicon.
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1. Qiaomei Fu, Matthias Meyer, Xing Gao, Udo Stenzel, Hernán A. Burbano, Janet Kelso, and Svante Pääbo (2013)
DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China
PNAS; published ahead of print January 22, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1221359110
