Let’s put the conclusion first: Peking Man, Lantian Man and Yuanmou Man belong to Homo erectus. They are one of the ape-men who migrated to various parts of the world from Africa about 1.7 million years ago.

But 200,000 years ago, new Homo sapiens appeared in Africa. They began to leave Africa 70,000 years ago, slowly migrating and occupying all parts of the world. The early Homo erectus slowly disappeared during or before this process.

So Beijingers are definitely not our ancestors.

The cavemen lived between 27,000 and 34,000 years ago. Since there is no funding for sequencing, it is not clear whether they were monkeys that escaped from Africa 70,000 years ago.

01 Peking Man and Shanshan Cave Man In middle school textbooks, I think everyone still remembers the picture below - Peking Man, also known as Peking Man erectus.

They were discovered in Zhoukoudian near Beijing. They lived about 410,000 to 670,000 years ago. They are representatives of the early Oriental Ape Man in China, with an average height of about 160cm.

Later, another batch of ancient human fossils—Singding Cave Man—were discovered in other caves in Zhoukoudian.

They lived around 27,000 to 34,000 years ago.

The brain capacity has reached 1300-1500 ml.

The male is approximately 1.74 meters tall and the female is 1.59 meters tall.

These characteristics are basically the same as those of modern people.

Our textbooks tell us that these ancient humans are our ancestors, and I always thought so.

02 Where did we come from? Let me first introduce a person, Ian Morris, a British historian and classicist, now a professor at Stanford University. He has a very famous book "Why the West Rules"

-for Now), the first two chapters of this book introduce how humans came to be based on the latest research results, as well as the similarities and differences in the evolution of Eastern and Western apes.

It refreshed my understanding. Now let’s put aside the title of the book and just look at how humans came from according to the latest archaeological research.

We generally know that humans originated in Africa.

Yes, apes can walk independently. They did first appear in Africa. About six to seven million years ago, apes that could walk upright were discovered.

But their brain capacity is about 400-500 milliliters, so it may be too early to call them humans.

About 2.5 million years ago, some East African apes had a brain capacity of 630 ml and were able to make rough stone tools. Paleoanthropologists called them "homo habilis".

But 1.8 million years ago, Homo habilis suddenly disappeared.

But another species of ape appeared 1.8 million years ago, called Homo erectus, with a brain capacity of 800 milliliters.

I don’t know whether it was because their activity range had narrowed, because of intra-group disputes, or just out of curiosity. About 1.7 million years ago, they began to slowly leave East Africa and gradually spread to Eurasia.

The earliest representative ape discovered in China is Peking Man, and the representative one in the West is Neanderthal.

But Pekingese are not our ancestors, and Neanderthals are not the ancestors of Europeans.

03 Homo sapiens About 70,000 years ago, a new species of human—us—migrated out of Africa and completely replaced all other human species.

This kind of human race is called "Homo sapiens" by paleoanthropologists.

The picture above is a possible route map of the migration of Homo sapiens speculated by paleoanthropologists.

As Homo sapiens migrated, other Homo erectus who had lived in Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years slowly disappeared, including Pekingese and Neanderthals.

We don’t know whether there was a war between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus during this period, but scientists have found that wherever the new humans, Homo sapiens, arrived, they were accompanied by huge destruction. In Australia, a 400-kilogram flightless bird, a

The lizards of Dayton, the camels, elephants and large sloths living on the ground in America all slowly became extinct with the arrival of Homo sapiens.

This may be because Homo sapiens were smarter in hunting, slowly began to learn to select crops, plant, and domesticate animals, and slowly developed villages and cities, squeezing the living space of other species.

However, the scientific community does not yet have a unified understanding of this.

04 You must be confused about why we are all descendants of Homo sapiens. Why do paleoanthropologists believe that Peking Man is not our ancestor, but a new monkey that came out of Africa? We all know that we inherited half of it from our parents.

of DNA.

But mitochondrial DNA in cells does not reproduce sexually like most DNA, but is inherited through maternal inheritance (men inherit their mother's mitochondrial DNA, but do not pass it on).

We once had the same mitochondrial DNA, but due to genetic mutations, we gradually developed certain differences.

But this difference will be relatively small.

In 1987, geneticist Rika Kahn studied the mitochondrial DNA of people around the world. By making standard estimates of mitochondrial DNA mutation rates, they pointed to a unique mother "African Eve" for mankind. Later, through

Various arguments in the field of genetics finally estimated the age of Eve in Africa to 150,000 years ago.