[curseofcasandra]

> I'm not convinced that this is any sort of neutral analysis

Did you actually read the article? Nowhere does it suggest that anyone is claiming that China is the origin of Homo Sapiens. This million old skull discovered in China is not Homo Sapien, but related to Denisoven. It’s scientifically interesting since it suggests two things

1. Homo sapiens have existed longer than we previously thought.

2. Homo Sapiens may have come out of Western Asia, not Africa. But China is not in West Asia…

Please find other articles to fit into your the-Chinese-are-supremacist narrative. This one is not relevant.

[gus_massa]

I mostly agree. Direct link to the paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202

I'm not an anthropologist and not even close, so a lot of uninformed opinions:

It has a few nice photos of the skull. It looks quite complete. 90%? And the reconstruction look accurate for my untrained eye, because there are few parts to guess, specially if you assume the skull is (almost) symmetrical.

I'm not sure if it's possible to cheat and give it an additional 1% or 2% of brain volume, but I guess it's not possible to give it a 10% more brain volume. Anyway, the volume is quite small compared to modern humans, that is not surprising because it's quite old.

IIUC figure 4 shows 3 big branches: Neanderthal (Europe???), Longi (Asia???) and Sapiens (Africa???). (Add a fee "???" here if necessary.) And the new fossil is in the "Longi" branch.

So as you say it may be an older than expected side chain, or something like that.

[Happy to get any corrections or more details.]