关键词: 旧石器;道县人牙化石;中国;现代人起源

Abstract: In the scenario suggested by both Recent Out of Africa and Assimilation hypotheses the Paleolithic prevalent in Levant during the time of inhabitation of the first population of modern humans in Asia was of Mode III. The proponents of ROA believe that it is most reasonable to infer that the descendants of this population arrived in China around 60kyr and thereafter totally replaced the indigenous population. Because Mode I is persisted in China since its occurrence so a sudden big change from Mode I to Mode III or other derived technique would happen in China during the replacement of the indigenous population by the immigrants. The Assimilation Hypothesis is somewhat different only in that the replacement was subtotal instead of total. To test the main hypotheses debating on the origin of modern humans in China, the authors present almost all Paleolithic sites of China with chronometric dates later than 130kyr in Table 1 in which the name, latitude and longitude of sites, dates, techniques of dating and Modes can be easily understood by English speaking people. This Table shows the technique of most of the sites are of Mode I, only a few are of Mode III, Mode IV and Mode V. The Mode III occurred as late as nearly 40kyr ago at Shuidonggou site. This circumstance is in accordance with the Multiregional Evolution hypothesis which predicts the persistence of Mode I in China before and after any date of the postulated replacement of indigenous population in China. In addition, the much fewer existence of Paleolithic sites of Modes other than Mode I supports the hypothesis of “Continuity with Hybridization” for human evolution in China. Other more Paleolithic sites without chronometric date but being attributed to Late Pleistocene based on faunal and stratigraphical correlations and yielding stone artefacts of Mode I further strengthen the conclusions of this paper. The newely published Daoxian human fossil teeth of 120-80 kya provide further evidence that the modern huamn morphology of China is more probably originated in native territory than from immigrants.

Key words: Modern human origin; China; Paleolithic; Daoxian human fossils