An international team of researchers located at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, including a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Washington at St. Louis, found human fossils with a good timing in southern China that clearly changed the anthropologist's perception of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern part of the Old World.
The research was published on October 25 in the early issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discovery of the remains of the first moder 
n human fossils in Zhirendong (Zhiren Cave) in southern China that are at least 100,000 years old provides the latest evidence of the emergence of modern humans in eastern Asia, at least 60,000 years older than modern humans previously known to originate from the region.
"The fossils help more generally redefine our perception of the emergence of modern humans in eastern Eurasia, and across the Old World," said Eric Trinkaus, PhD, who is a professor of Science and Art at the Mary Tileston Hemenway and professor of physical anthropology .
The Zhirendong fossils have a mixture of modern and ancient features that are the opposite of earlier modern humans in east Africa and southwest Asia, indicating some degree of sustainability of human populations in Asia with the advent of modern humans.
Zhirendong Man indicates that the spread of modern human biology precedes cultural innovations and Upper Paleolithic technology and that early modern humans lived together for tens of millennia with the last ancient humans north far and west across the Eurasia.