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7.21

Intellectuals

The Intellectual

Schematic diagram of the restoration of the Middle and Late Pleistocene fauna in the Gangga Basin (drawn by Li Xia) | Source: Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Earth System Basic Science Center

Written by Zhang Zechuan

Editors: Feng Hao and Li Shanshan

On the map of Eurasia, there is an unavoidable intersection between the east and west ends, which is the narrow passage south of the Altai Mountains and north of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. This road is a traffic corridor in written records, giving birth to the once glorious Silk Road. So, what about before written records? How did humans thrive in this plateau corridor during the long period of time without records?

On July 3, 2024, Nature magazine published the latest research results on Denisovans by an international research team composed of Lanzhou University, the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This research is based on a series of fossil specimens including the newly identified Denisovan specimens (hereinafter referred to as Denisovans) and thousands of animal fossils found in the Baishiya Karst Cave in the southern Tibetan Autonomous Region of Gansu (hereinafter referred to as the Baishiya site). This new discovery will greatly help us restore the living conditions of early humans and understand how early humans survived in the plateau.

Ancestors in the Mist: An Overview of Ancient Human Research in China

Earlier in 2024, the China Association for Science and Technology released 30 major scientific issues for this year, among which "Are the ancient humans found in China the ancestors of modern Chinese people?" was listed as one of the top ten cutting-edge scientific issues. Behind this issue are a series of academic issues that have not been clearly explained since the last century.

The starting point of ancient human research in China, and also one of the origins of modern archaeological research in China, was the Zhoukoudian archaeological project launched in the 1920s. In the Zhoukoudian Ape Man Cave, the first generation of Chinese paleoanthropologists, led by Pei Wenzhong and Jia Lanpo, and foreign scholars including Andersson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Barber discovered the Peking Man (Homo erectus pekingensisBlack & Zdansky, 1927) and the Upper Cave Man fossils, which respectively represented the oldest fossil records of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens found in East Asia at that time. Unfortunately, these fossil specimens were lost during the Anti-Japanese War.

On July 17, 2023, relying on new technologies and methods, a fossil fragment of the skull of the Peking Man was identified among the animal fossils at Site 15 in Zhoukoudian. [1]

The next step forward in the study of ancient Chinese humans came after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, large-scale field archaeological research was carried out across the country, and soon began to bear fruit. In 1958, scientists discovered early Homo sapiens fossils near Maba Town, Qujiang District, Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, and named them Maba Man. In 1964, based on fossil specimens found in Lantian County, Shaanxi Province the previous year, archaeologists named Lantian Man (Homo erectus lantianensis). In May 1965, archaeologists collected two human tooth fossils in Yuanmou, Yunnan, and named them Yuanmou Man (Homo erectus yuanmouensis) after studying them.

So far, fossil records from early Homo erectus to late Homo sapiens have been found in China, which means that human evolution in China has never been interrupted. However, in contrast, the current Paleolithic Homo sapiens fossil records are basically concentrated in central and eastern China. The Baishiya site is located in Gannan, which belongs to the traditional western region geographically. This provides important fossil evidence for explaining the evolution of Homo sapiens in western China. At the same time, the Homo sapiens found here is a unique existence.

Who were the Denisovans?

What are Denisovas? In 2010, Russian scientists discovered human fossils in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains on the Russian side. Based on the sequencing and analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of the fossil specimens, combined with the DNA analysis of human specimens found at the Baishiya site and the Cobra Cave in Laos, they identified the third type of primitive human, the Denisovans, in addition to the Neanderthals and the Heidelberg people. [2] It should be noted that the name Denisovans is only based on genetic research and is not a serious name in paleontology.

As the last ancient human to be discovered, scientists still don’t know much about the Denisovans. Because Denisova Cave was not only inhabited by Denisovans, but also by Neanderthals, and there are traces of nomadic activities, so research on early Denisovans is fraught with difficulties. Based on the existing evidence, in the intermittent fossil records, the activities of the Denisovans experienced a large-scale southward migration, from the Altai Mountains to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and then to the Indochina Peninsula. The last Denisovans probably settled on a small island in the South Pacific - 4% of modern South Pacific DNA can be traced back to Denisovans, compared to only 2% in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and none in Europe. [3]

Some studies have suggested that the Dan people are actually a branch of Homo longi. In 2021, the team of Ji Qiang, a distinguished professor at Hebei University of Geosciences, published a study on a complete ancient human skull fossil found in Heilongjiang Province, naming it the Long Man. The DNA-based analysis in the study suggests that the closest relative to the Long Man is the Dan people found at the Baishiya site, and that the former is older than the Dan people. Therefore, from a taxonomic perspective, the Dan people should be considered a descendant of the Long Man. [4] This study currently lacks circumstantial evidence.

Dragon Man fossil specimen, cited from Ni et al. 2021

Amidst the heavy fog, the Baishiya site is an important location where the Danes migrated from north to south. The study of the materials found at this site is extremely important for our understanding of the history of the Danes.

The Baishiya site is located in the southern Gansu Tibetan Autonomous Region. In the eleventh year of the Tibetan calendar (1644 AD), a lama temple was built at the Baishiya where the cave is located, which is the Baishiya Temple. Before the official excavation, believers had picked up fossils on the surface of the cave sediments in the cave, but did not cause large-scale damage to all the sedimentary areas in the cave. Zhang Dongju, a professor at Lanzhou University and the corresponding author of the study, recalled to The Intellectuals that believers actually caused little damage to the fossil layer in the cave. "Local people did pick up animal fossils in the cave before, but they did not dig or collect them on purpose... At least in recent decades, the temple has played an important role in protecting the cave, and basically no one has gone in to collect fossils."

In the 1980s, while practicing in the cave, a local lama discovered a human mandible fossil, which was handed over to the country by the Sixth Gongtangcang Living Buddha. This specimen marked the beginning of scientific research at the Baishiya site.

Denisovans Hiding in a Cave

The highlight of this new study is the newly reported Denisovan fossil discovered using the ZooMS method.

ZooMS, the full name of which is Zooarcheaology by Mass Spectrumetry, is an animal archaeology method based on mass spectrometry. This method first extracts the residual protein in the specimen, digests it into peptides, analyzes the data using a mass spectrometer, and finally compares it with a large database to determine the identity of the specimen. [5] This ancient protein analysis method is very suitable for analyzing the broken animal fossils found at the Baishiya site.

During the experiment, the research team labeled the peptides of type I collagen (COL1) of 14 hominids, including one peptide unique to the Hominoidae, on a broken distal rib fossil. Based on the current geographical distribution of hominid fossils, this specimen was classified as an ancient human. After further phylogenetic comparisons, it was proved to be a new Denisovan fossil.

New fossil specimens of Danes published in Xia et al. 2024 (this study) and their classification based on cladistic systematics.

However, this is not the first Denisovan fossil specimen found at the Baishiya site. In 2019, a team led by researcher Chen Fahu from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a study in Nature based on a fossil mandible from the Baishiya site donated by the sixth Gongtangcang Living Buddha. The study examined the chronology and physical anthropology of the mandible fossil and analyzed the ancient protein structure of the specimen. Chronological analysis indicated that the specimen was formed at least 160,000 years ago, and physical anthropology and ancient protein structure analysis classified the specimen as a Denisovan among early humans. The specimen was named "Xiahe Man" by the research team. The newly discovered specimen was also classified as "Xiahe Man." [6]

Xiahe Man fossil specimen published in 2019, cited in Chen et al. 2019.

The newly discovered fossil was found in the third layer of sediments at the Baishiya site, which was previously dated to be about 48,000 to 32,000 years ago. Prior to this, in 2020, the same research team published a study confirming that mitochondrial DNA residues of the Dan people were detected in this layer, so the two studies confirmed each other [7]. In different sedimentary layers of Baishiya, the oldest stratum in which Dan people's DNA was detected was 108,000 years old. These research results prove that the Dan people have been active in the Gannan area for at least 60,000 years.

The Danes have their own clever plan

——How to survive on the plateau tens of thousands of years ago

In addition to the Danish fossils, the research team also discovered thousands of animal fossils at the Baishiya site, and the new research also revolves around these fossil specimens.

The research team found that a considerable number of fossils preserved traces of stone processing. After analyzing using the ZooMS method, the research team classified these specimens into more than 20 kinds of animals, all of which were common mammals in the Xiahe area where Baishiya was located at the time. After a comprehensive analysis combined with traditional methods, the team found that the main source of the fossils found in the Baishiya site was the hunting activities of the Dan people. During the Dan people's activities that lasted for tens of thousands of years, the most hunted animals by the Dan people were mountain antelopes, and they would fully process and utilize the mountain antelopes obtained from hunting. In addition to mountain antelopes, the Dan people would also process all available resources, including large herbivorous mammals, carnivorous mammals and birds. This means that over a long period of time, the Dan people have adapted well to the climate of Gannan and thrived here.

Representative animal bone fossils with traces of Danish processing shown in Xia et al. 2024. It can be seen that the Danish at that time processed and utilized all parts of the obtained animal remains.

"From the perspective of survival strategy, climate change (contemporaneous with the Denisovans) should have had a certain impact on the animal resources available to the Denisovans, but it did not pose a threat to their survival. On the contrary, it may have enabled them to develop highly flexible environmental adaptability, utilizing all available animal resources and making full use of them. Perhaps it is precisely because of this that the Denisovans were able to live on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for a long time," Zhang Dongju explained.

It is not easy to accurately measure the relationship between human activity and animal fossils found in the same place, especially when animals may have adopted caves as their habitats. In European studies, scientists have spent a lot of time clarifying the relationship between cave bear fossils and human activity, and have determined that in a considerable number of cases, cave bears and Homo sapiens were in quite intense conflict. [8]

At the crossroads where east, west, south and north meet

The research published in the five years from 2019 to 2024 is not the end of the fossil specimens at the Baishiya site, and there are still many scientific problems to be solved. "The most critical one will be the revelation and identification of the characteristics of the Denisovan stone tool making technology, and this work is still in progress. I hope it can be achieved in the future," said Zhang Dongju.

In 2020, Zhang Dongju published a paper on the chronology and paleoenvironmental DNA analysis of Baishiya in Nature, in which he mentioned that ancient human stone tools were found in various fossil layers of Baishiya along with animal fossil fragments. The Dan people active in Baishiya correspond to the human civilization period of the middle to late Paleolithic period, and the interpretation of these stone tools is also of extraordinary significance.

First, these stone tools are of great significance for studying the evolution of Denisovan civilization. In the Denisova Cave, which was discovered earlier, the activities of the Denisova people overlapped with those of the Neanderthals, and there was also human activity after that. This makes it difficult for the stone tools in the Denisova Cave to provide a reference for studying the unique stone tool processing characteristics of the Denisova people. [9] Studying the stone tools preserved at the Baishiya site may help us clarify the cultural characteristics and technological characteristics of the Denisova people's stone tools, thereby providing important comparative data for possible new discoveries in the future.

Stone tool samples from the bottom layer of Denisova Cave, cited in Brown et al. 2022. Denisova Cave not only preserves the stone tool records of the Denisova people, but also contains mixed Neanderthal records, so there is controversy as to whether it can serve as a reference for studying the stone tool patterns of the Denisova people themselves.

Secondly, during the migration of the Danes from north to south, the Baishiya site had another special significance - that is, it was also located on the main route of early cultural exchanges between the East and the West.

In previous Chinese Paleolithic archaeology, archaeologists have keenly observed that there is communication between Chinese Paleolithic tools and the West of the Old World, while still retaining some East Asian characteristics. This is very obvious in the early records of the Paleolithic Age. For example, hand axes with similar functions to those in the West were found in the Yunxian site, which is about 800,000 years old. [10][11] However, in the subsequent stone tool records, differences in the development of stone tools between the East and the West began to emerge. The Paleolithic tools in the East began to show some unique localization patterns, such as using local materials and simple processing patterns. In the late Paleolithic Age, the development of stone tools in China became more complicated. In western and northern China, the representative stone tools were mainly blades, while in northern and eastern China, they were mainly flakes. The watershed between blades and flakes in geographical distribution was related to the 400 mm precipitation line in history at that time. [12] So what new insights will the stone tools found at the Baishiya site bring us?

In an era without written records, humans have already thrived on Earth and brought their unique cultural imprints to every corner of the Earth. Baishiya is the intersection of the east, west, south, and north crossroads. Here, ancient humans left behind the remains of their lives, leaving us with rich evidence for later generations to peek into their world.

(The author is Zhang Zechuan, a doctoral student at China University of Geosciences (Beijing), and his current research direction is the evolution of early theropod dinosaurs.)

[1] “Newly discovered ancient human parietal fossils at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site”, https://www.cas.cn/syky/202307/t20230717_4929426.shtml

[2]Krause, J. Fu, Q., Good, J., Viola, B., Shunkov, M., Derevianko, A.m., & Pääbo, S. (2010). The Complete Mitochondrial DNA Genome of an Unknown Hominin from Southern Siberia. Nature. 464. 894-7. 10.1038/nature08976.

[3]Reich, D., Green, R., Kircher, M., Krause, J., Patterson, N., Durand, E., Viola, B., Briggs, A., Stenzel, U., Johnson, P., Maricic, T., Good, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Fu, Q., Mallick, S., Li, H., Meyer, M. Eichler, E., Pääbo, S. (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature. 468. 1053-60. 10.1038/nature09710.

[4]Ji Q, Wu W, Ji Y, Li Q, Ni X. (2021). Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species. Innovation (Camb). 2021 Aug 28;2(3):100132. doi: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100132. PMID: 34557772; PMCID: PMC8454552.

[5]McGrath, K., Rowsell, K., Gates St-Pierre, C. et al. Identifying Archaeological Bone via Non-Destructive ZooMS and the Materiality of Symbolic Expression: Examples from Iroquoian Bone Points. Sci Rep 9, 11027 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47299-x

[6]Chen, F., Welker, F., Shen, CC. et al., (2019). A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau. Nature 569, 409–412. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1139-x

[7]Zhang, D. et al., (2020). Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau.Science 370,584-587.DOI:10.1126/science.abb6320

[8]Torres, T., Ortiz, J., Cobo, R., Hoz, P., García-Redondo, A., Grün, R. (2007) Hominid exploitation of the environment and cave bear populations. The case of Ursus spelaeus Rosenmüller-Heinroth in Amutxate cave (Aralar, Navarra-Spain), Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 52, Issue 1.1-15.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2006.07.013.

[9]Brown, S., Massilani, D., Kozlikin, M., Shunkov, M., Derevianko, A., Stoessel, A., Jope-Street, B., Meyer, M., Kelso, J., Pääbo, S., Higham, C., Douka, K. (2022). The earliest Denisovans and their cultural adaptation. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 6. 1-8. 10.1038/s41559-021-01581-2.

[10]Tianyuan, L., Etler, D. New Middle Pleistocene hominid crania from Yunxian in China. Nature 357, 404–407 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1038/357404a0

[11] Gao Xing, 2012. “Characteristics and significance of hand axes from the Paleolithic Age in China”, Acta Vertebrate Paleontology, Vol. 31, No. 2. DOI: :1000-3193(2012)02-0097-16

[12]Li, F. (2014). Disparate Stone Age Technological Evolution in North China: Lithic Technological Variability and Relations between Populations during MIS 3. Journal of Anthropological Research. 70. 10.3998/jar.0521004.0070.103.