A prehistoric human known as Homo erectus was the first of our forerunners to leave Africa, crossing continents and ultimately roaming the planet for almost 2 million years. But with scarce genetic material available to study, the species remains a major mystery in human origins.
Now, scientists have retrieved ancient proteins from six teeth unearthed in China that, for the first time, reveal a molecular link between Homo erectus and later human species, including our own: Homo sapiens.
“This is a major step forward in tying together the broken branches of our human evolutionary tree,” said Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, who was not involved in the study. “Homo erectus has long been a bit of an enigma.”
Homo erectus remains have been found in Africa, Asia and Europe; however, obtaining informative molecular data such as DNA has proved challenging given the fossils’ age and poor preservation.
In a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, Chinese geneticist Fu Qiaomei and her colleagues successfully extracted and analyzed ancient enamel proteins from the teeth unearthed at three sites in China. All the teeth date from around 400,000 years ago.
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