And Australopithecus begat Homo habilis , and Homo habilis begat Homo erectus . Then, a million years or so ago, Homo erectus left the African Eden and headed east, not, like Cain, into the land of Nod, but into Asia. Some believe that the transformation into Homo sapiens happened across the whole of the geographic range where Homo erectus had settled. Others think Homo erectus split into many local forms, one of which became modern Homo sapiens while the others died out. This accords with a famous computer analysis of the distribution of genes in today' s world which implies that modern Homo sapiens burst out of Africa in a second exodus about 100,000 years ago.
People have re-run the computer analysis and found it less compelling than it seemed.
Fossils combining features from erectus and sapiens and coming from Asia, not Africa, would offer especially strong support. A new discovery and a recent reinterpretation seem to have provided just that. The discovery was made by Li Tianyuan of the Hubei Institute of Archaeology in Wuhan, China. In the current edition of Nature, he and Dennis Etler of the University of California at Berkeley describe two skulls found near the Han river in Yunxian, an area of central China. The Yunxian skulls are between 350,000 and 500,000 years old, and though battered and bereft of jaw-bones they are better specimens than any other human fossils of the same age found in China.