A Strange Fossil in South China Reveals an Intriguing Link With The First Americans
MIKE MCRAE
15 JULY 2022
Remains recovered from a cave in the Chinese province of Yunnan more than 10 years ago have finally given up their secrets, with a DNA analysis revealing not just who left them, but ultimately where their ancestors would go.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences evaluated nuclear and mitochondrial sequences extracted from a 14,000-year-old skull, discovering the woman it once belonged to – dubbed Mengzi Ren – was closely related to populations who would eventually be the first to set foot in the Americas.
Since their discovery in 2008, the dozens of late Paleolithic human bones left behind in Malu Dong (Red Deer Cave) in China's south-west have left anthropologists scratching their heads over just who they might have belonged to.
Without sufficient collagen to base a carbon dating analysis on, their age can only be estimated from surrounding features of their grave site. It's not even clear if the mix of bones that includes a skull fragment and the top end of a femur all come from the same individual.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/dna-from-a-strange-fossil-in-south-china-reveals-ancient-link-with-the-first-americans
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14-JUL-2022
DNA from ancient population in Southern China suggests Native Americans’ East Asian roots
Peer-Reviewed Publication
CELL PRESS
CREDIT: XUEPING JI
For the first time, researchers successfully sequenced the genome of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China. The data, published July 14 in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the mysterious hominin belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.
“Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool,” Su says. “It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features,” he says.
The researchers compared the genome of these fossils to that of people from around the world. They found that the bones belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans. Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.
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From the cave, researchers recovered a hominin skull cap with characteristics of both modern humans and archaic humans. For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, and its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans. As a result, some anthropologists had thought the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.
More:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958575
= new reply since forum marked as read
this is the first one that turned up in China. 
Since there were Native American in North America before 14,000 years ago, if this fossil is 14,000 years old, it must be a descendant of an earlier population that contributed to Native American DNA. This fossil would explain why some Native Americans in South America have some DNA that is linked to Austronesians.
