Peking Man - Relation To Modern Chinese People

Relation To Modern Chinese People

Franz Weidenreich considered Peking Man as a human ancestor and specifically an ancestor of the Chinese people, as seen in his original multiregional model of human evolution in 1946. Chinese writings on human evolution in 1950 generally considered evidence insufficient to determine whether Peking Man was ancestral to modern humans. One view was that Peking Man in some ways resembled modern Europeans more than modern Asians. However, this debate of the origin has sometimes become complicated by issues of Chinese nationalism. By 1952, however, Peking Man had been considered by some to be a direct ancestor of modern humans. Some paleontologists have noted a perceived continuity in skeletal remains.

A 1999 study undertaken by Chinese geneticist Jin Li showed that the genetic diversity of modern Chinese people is well within that of the whole world population, which suggests there was no inter-breeding between modern human immigrants to East Asia and Homo erectus, such as Peking Man, and that the Chinese are descended from Africa, like all other modern humans, in accordance with the recent single-origin hypothesis. However, the RRM2P4 gene data suggests that the Chinese, while largely descending from Africa like others, nevertheless have some genetic legacy from hybridization with older Eurasian populations, consistent with limited multiregional evolution.