What if Homo erectus (H. erectus), the direct ancestor of modern humans, arrived in China much earlier than previously thought? New research published in Science Advances on February 18 may rewrite our understanding of early human dispersal in that area.
A study by a team of geoscientists and anthropologists, including corresponding author Christopher J. Bae from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Social Sciences, confirms that H. erectus appeared in Yunxian, China, 1.7 million years ago, about 600,000 years earlier than previous studies indicated.
Prior to this study, which was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the U.S. National Science Foundation, the oldest Yunxian H. erectus fossils were reported to be about 1.1 million years old. The revised timeline reshapes one of the earliest chapters of human history, suggesting our ancestors spread across continents earlier — and possibly more successfully — than scientists once believed.
“While Homo erectus, our distant ancestor, is widely recognized to have originated in Africa before dispersing into Eurasia, the precise timeline of its arrival in eastern Asia was unknown,” said Bae. “Using the combination of the Yunxian H. erectus fossils and burial dating data, we have now been able to recreate a fairly robust dating reconstruction of when these hominins appeared in eastern Asia.”
The researchers used Aluminum-26 (Al-26) and Beryllium-10 (Be-10) burial dating to determine the age of the Yunxian fossils. Hua Tu, lead author, describes the method as using aluminum and beryllium isotopes in sediment from the same stratigraphic level as the fossils to determine when it was first buried and shielded from cosmic radiation.
For the full story, see https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/18/early-human-ancestor-journey/
