The East Eurasian phenotype — the set of physical traits common among many East Asian, Siberian, and some Southeast Asian populations — didn’t appear overnight. It developed over tens of thousands of years as ancient human populations adapted to diverse climates, diets, and environments across the vast lands east of the Eurasian Steppe.
Modern genetic studies suggest that many distinctive traits — including epicanthic folds, shovel-shaped incisors, thicker hair shafts, and skin tone variations — evolved as adaptive responses to cold climates, UV radiation, and dietary factors during the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 40,000–10,000 years ago).
These traits are believed to have crystallized among ancient hunter-gatherer populations in northern and eastern Asia, particularly in regions like Siberia, the Yellow River basin, and the Amur River valley. Later migrations spread this phenotype widely — into China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia — blending with local groups over millennia.
Genetics also shows fascinating connections between East Eurasians and Native Americans, who migrated across Beringia during the Ice Age, carrying parts of this shared ancestry into the New World.
This story is still unfolding, thanks to ancient DNA research — revealing how migration, climate, and time have shaped the diversity of human appearance across continents.
'Historic hair samples collected from Aboriginal people show that following an initial migration 50,000 years ago, populations spread rapidly around the east and west coasts of Australia.'
'The findings uncovered at Oldupai Gorge and across eastern Africa indicate that early human movements across and out of Africa were possible by 2 million years ago, as hominins possessed the behavioural ability to expand into novel ecosystems.'
Part of this may be due to the use of stone tools, technology which (it is speculated) may have been employed by other hominin species such as australopithecines:
'... we know that the genus Paranthropus was present in Oldupai Gorge at this time.'
Tibet:
DNA from the hominin species knows as Denisovans has been found in sediment in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan plateau - the first such find outside Siberia. The specimens date from c. 100,000 years ago, again from 60,000 years ago, and possibly also 50k-30k ya; in the latter case that may have overlapped with the arrival of modern humans and interbreeding there or elsewhere could explain why 'present-day Tibetans carry a gene variant that aids high-altitude survival'.
Conflict between Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals
An academic at Bath University suggests there was a 100,000-year war between the two species that pitched modern humans against the Neanderthals that had preceded them out of Africa and were already thriving in Europe and Asia:
Article on early man in southern South Africa 200,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower - the hunting grounds since partially inundated following the end of the Ice Age:
Parallel DNA research into human and canine genomes is sketching an 11,000-year-long (or more) history of their relationship. The five separate dog genomes have expanded to 32:
Dingoes, on the other hand, seem to have arrived in western Australia some 3,500 years ago - far later than humans - and although some were recorded living with aboriginals in 1788 they don't feature much in ancient rock art; perhaps for roving hunter-gatherers dingoes were an unaffordable luxury?
It's also thought that our ancestors mated with Neanderthals before that first wave of emigrants, which then either died out or returned to Africa; then some of the second wave (c. 50,000 years ago) also mingled with Neanderthals; and later, in Southeast Asia, also mated with 'Denisovans' and another unknown species, possibly more.
Aside from archaeological finds, there are several other threads connecting prehistoric Taiwan with the spread of humans through the Pacific island chains.
A third is the study of human genes. A 2014 study of mitochondrial DNA from a c. 8,000-year-old skeleton unearthed on an island off the Chinese mainland links China to Taiwan and Austronesia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951936/
Figure 1: The Liangdao Man Skeleton (picture from here)
The same study suggests a prehistoric migration route as illustrated below, from an area where foxtail millet began to be cultivated (around what is now modern Beijing), to the region where rice was domesticated (surrounding modern Shanghai), to what is now Fuzhou on the mainland (1), on to Liangdao island (2), across to Taiwan (3) and then down to the Philippines (4) and beyond:
(Ibid., adapted from Figure 5)
How did these humans cross over from the mainland? At its narrowest, the Taiwan Strait is about 130 kilometres (80 miles) between Fujian and Taiwan.
Things were different in the last Ice Age. The Strait is now some 100 metres deep, but: 'Pleistocene glaciations lowered [the] sea level 140m in the East China Sea 15,000 years ago, forming a land bridge between Taiwan and the mainland, with Palaeolithic artifacts on both sides. In the initial Holocene 10,000 years ago, melting ice raised the East China Sea 100m, quickly forming the Taiwan Strait.' - from 'The Neolithic Taiwan Strait', by Kuang-chih Chang (1989) https://web.archive.org/web/20120418153210/http://http-server.carleton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/App.18ChangKC89.pdf
'Permafrost covered Asia as far south as Beijing,' says Wikipedia, so perhaps early humans were motivated to go further south, and some willing and able to walk over the exposed land between China and Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#Asia
One might think that this flooding was a spur to the development of boats, but although the earliest found by archaeological excavation date back 7,000 - 10,000 years, other evidence suggests that they existed tens of thousands of years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat#History
Indeed, recent finds in Central America suggest that homo sapiens may have arrived by sea 20,000 - 30,000 years ago and spread north and south from there, rather than coming though the Alaskan/Canadian ice corridor as previously thought: http://polynesiantimes.blogspot.com/2020/07/origins-americas-first-colonised-in.html
Contrary to what one might assume, the post-glacial flooding was not uniform in all times and places. As the vast weight of ice was lifted from the land the continental plates started to shift about and rise up further from the Earth's mantle, like a ship being emptied of cargo. 'At the same time that Polynesians were undergoing their journeys of exploration and discovery, 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, sea level was falling and exposing coastal plains that then became habitable, where previously the sea was up against clay banks or cliffs,' says Fletcher. 'In the Pacific region [after c. 4,000-5,000 years ago], sea level started to fall until a few centuries ago. And now global warming is causing sea levels to rise again.' https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-seas-rise-tropical-pacific-islands-face-a-perfect-storm
Although falling sea levels may have made it easier to land boats, 'around AD 1300 there was rapid global cooling, which was followed shortly by rapid sea-level fall – perhaps as much as 50-70 cm within 100 years in the Pacific [...] 'In almost every island group in the Pacific - from Solomon Islands and Fiji in the west to Rapa and Easter Island in the east – the first signs of collapse appear around AD 1300 with almost all hill forts beginning to be occupied around AD 1400. [...] 'Rapid sea-level fall along Pacific island coasts would have lowered coastal water tables, slowed water circulation within lagoons and killed (through exposure) the most productive parts of coral reefs. A food crisis would have resulted for coastal dwellers. Conflict followed. So people fled inland where they stayed, more or less, for several hundred years.' https://theconversation.com/rise-and-fall-social-collapse-linked-to-sea-level-in-the-pacific-56268
So the interaction between geography, climate and human history is unexpectedly complex.
So to some extent the genes of Homo Neanderthalensis' descendants are also represented in the Pacific region:
'Some recent studies suggest that all humans outside of Africa have inherited some genes from Neanderthals, and that Melanesians are the only known modern humans whose prehistoric ancestors interbred with the Denisova hominin, sharing 4%–6% of their genome with this ancient cousin of the Neanderthal,' says Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesians.
'New evidence gleaned from the study of a common plant species lends further credence to the theory that Taiwan is the ancestral homeland of the Austronesian-speaking peoples,' says this 2015 article in Taiwan Today reporting on research that links Taiwan to a tree now found across the Pacific, the paper mulberry, used to make tapa cloth.
So on their skilled and dangerous voyages across the ocean, the Austronesian migrants must have taken not just food, tools and domestic animals but seeds and cuttings of the precious tree.
'After a detailed DNA analysis of the genomes of more than 800 Polynesians and Native Americans, both modern and prehistoric, researchers have found evidence of contact between the two groups as far back as 1200 CE...
"Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia," the researchers explain in their paper.
The common ancestors of the humanoids known as Neanderthals and Denisovans spread across Europe and Asia over half a million years ago, and split into the two branches, with fossils of Neanderthals found in western countries and of Denisovans in the East. What is thought to have been the first wave of Homo Sapiens came from Africa c. 270,000 years ago and some may have mated with Neanderthals.
'A 2017 study of ancient DNA from southern Africa investigated 16 ancient genomes from people alive over the last 10,000 years. This showed that the history of African populations was complex. There wasn’t just a single group of humans around in Africa when they expanded out 100,000 years ago.
It’s a result that was supported earlier this year by a paper examining ancient DNA from four individuals from what is now Cameroon. Taken together, this research suggests there were geographically diverse groups in Africa well before the main expansion out of the continent. And many of these groups will have contributed to the ancestry of people alive in Africa today. [...]
The new paper provides evidence that there may also have been gene-flow into the ancestors of West Africans directly from a mysterious archaic hominin. [...]
Interestingly, they suggest that 6%-7% of the genomes of West Africans is archaic in origin. But this archaic ancestry wasn’t Neanderthal or Denisovan. Their model suggested the additional ancestry came from an archaic population for which we don’t currently have a genome.
This ghost population likely split from the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 and 1.02 million years ago. That was well before the gene-flow event that brought Neanderthal DNA back into West Africa around 43,000 years ago – although the value of this could be anywhere between 0 and 124,000 years ago.'
Our ramble begins with an internet writer's reference to an Australian comedy book from the Seventies, The Outcasts Of Foolgarah. Surfing the reviews, I came across a Depression-era larrikin Oz classic, Here's Luck, by journo and rake Lennie Lower, which is now making us laugh.
But Outcasts, by Frank Hardy, was far from the author's most significant work. His most notorious was one that got him in court for criminal libel - the last case of its kind in Victoria; but that's not where this journey leads us. The experiences of the Depression that gave Lower his comic material had radicalised Hardy, as they did so many others, prompting him to join the Communist Party and use his talents to fight the Establishment.
We have since learned what Communism did; but the instincts that it exploited - compassion for the poor, and vicarious indignation - are valid. In our secular age, they inform ecological panic and adolescent self-loathing, an opportunity for ostentatious do-gooders to secure bossy, well-upholstered sinecures for themselves.
In Australia, they take us to the aboriginals.
Twenty thousand years before Neanderthals recolonised an unpeopled Ice Age Britain, forty thousand before modern man supplanted them in Europe, even longer before humans saw the Americas, the first Australians came to their island continent. Early agriculture? The cities of China and Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mohenjo Daro, the stones of Wiltshire and Giza? Last week's news.
For them, time had no meaning, as is so with all of us, our past always fading into dream, driving us to build, write, record images; futile attempts to preserve our intangible selves in something that endures forever, though nothing will.
Where are their monuments? In their minds, and in their tongues. In their myths of creation and arrival, in the songman's store of rhymes that give life-saving directions for nomads in a pitiless land; an inconceivably long heirloom of songs, some maybe stretching back to the birth of language itself. Old to young, old to young, the chain continued, handing on words and skills that gave them their law and culture; the policeman and warrior, the getter of food and drink, the builder of shelters contained in their skins and carried within their hands and brains wherever they went.
Until the last link broke.
Dispossession, displacement, disrespect; opium via the Oriental trading in Port Darwin; alcohol everywhere, ruining the young as it did their counterparts in America, where sometimes crazy-drunk First Nation kids hang out of cars as they tear around settlement lands which they cannot sell or mortgage.
Instead of the remorseless pressure of daily survival, jobs: money, enough to get by and for some, to dream the modern dreams of easy intoxication. And since the young stopped listening to the old, the elders (some, at least) shut their lips. One by one, the guiding stars of the aboriginal are winking out of existence, taking their knowledge with them.
Materially, a little is done to compensate material wrongs, some in response to action by the victims themselves. Following a walkout in 1966 by mistreated Gurindji aboriginal workers at the vast Wave Hill cattle station, a small portion of their traditional lands were eventually restored to them, and the law has begun to address past injustices. Frank Hardy helped to publicise the issues in his book The Unlucky Australians, and a TV documentary followed.
What can make up for the vast, invisible vandalism of an ancient way of life? Like all humanity, the original Australians have always known war and crime, but what they carried in them was no less precious and far older than the historical relics over which we wonder and grieve in museums.
Still, many times older is the history of humanoids written into all our genes, itself dwarfed by the general relay of life that began billions of years ago. It is fleeting life that endures.
"Of these hominins, only Neanderthals and Denisovans are currently known; the others remain unnamed and have only been detected as traces of DNA surviving in different modern populations."
"Scientists at Binghamton University in New York sequenced the genomes of 35 residents of the remote equatorial islands of Melanesia and compared them to DNA extracted from ancient remains of Denisovans and Neanderthals... The genetic overlap of between the ancient hominids and modern Melanesians measured between 1.9 and 3.4 percent... The latest evidence suggests modern humans and early human relatives interbred on at least three separate occasions."
Via UPI - http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/03/17/Ancient-DNA-fragments-found-in-modern-humans/7591458241503/?spt=mps&or=5&sn=sn
Full paper in Science Magazine: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/03/16/science.aad9416.full
