The dominant paradigm regarding human evolution since the split with Pan considers australopithecines as hominins, i.e., the closest relatives and/or direct ancestors of Homo. Historically, this paradigm started from the assumption that the Homo/Pan/Gorilla last common ancestor was a knuckle-walking ape that evolved into the fully upright (orthograde), obligate bipedal genus Homo, whereas Pan and Gorilla remained knuckle-walkers. Obligate terrestrial upright bipedalism, unique for our species, is an odd locomotor behaviour for a primate. Therefore, it had become generally accepted that a cooler and drier African climate had caused deforestation, which had forced our ancestors to develop upright bipedalism as an adaptation to living on open grassland savannah. This view, already held by Lamarck and Darwin, appeared most parsimonious in the almost complete absence of fossils. The discovery in the 20th century of australopithecine fossils, bipedal apes with small brains, in open country in southern and eastern Africa corroborated the savannah paradigm. Therefore, australopithecines are considered hominins. However, it is now recognized that most australopithecines instead lived in a mosaic of forests, grasslands and wetlands, and better knowledge of their fossils clearly indicates that they possessed several climbing adaptations. Moreover, none of the extinct ape species older than Australopithecus and Paranthropus for which postcranial remains have been described (e.g., Morotopithecus, Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus) were knuckle-walking. On the other hand, upright posture/gait is already present to different degrees even in Miocene apes. Moreover, the notion that hominoid orthogrady is a primitive characteristic is corroborated by the growing consensus that knuckle-walking is not a primitive trait but has evolved in parallel, independently in both Pan and Gorilla. Consequently, it is possible that australopithecines are not transitional between a semi-erect ancestor and upright bipedal humans, but to the contrary, are intermediate between a more upright ancestor and extant semi-erect African apes. In summary, hypotheses that attempt to explain how a semi-erect Homo/Pan last common ancestor transitioned into the bipedal australopithecines as an adaptation to life on the savannah appear to be ill-conceived and moreover seem to have been superfluous from the very start. We review the numerous similarities between australopithecines and extant African apes, suggesting that they are possibly not hominins and therefore not our direct ancestors. We suggest that we may have been barking up the wrong ancestral tree, for almost a century.
The earliest writing in China is the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, which records early Chinese, also known as oracle bone Chinese, which are all monosyllabic-words (1300 BC). In the Bronze Inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty and later handed down documents, doublets appear (beginning in 1046 BC). At present, the philological academy believes that the doublets recorded with two Chinese single-characters come from reduplication of two single-character symbols, but there is no complete argument and reliable evidence. This article, by using the opposite method of argument, reversely assumes that the single-characters (monosyllabic words) come from doublets and tries to demonstrate it. The article proves the truth of the origin of doublets based on the word distribution and semantic correspondence between doublets and single-characters in “the Book of Poetry”, that is, doublets are the source and single-characters are flows. Among them, 39.66% of the doublets have no corresponding single-characters, and they are the characters created to record doublets; 41.92% of the meanings of doublets have nothing to do with the meanings of single-characters, which proves that the doublets does not come from the combination of single-characters; 12.46% of the meanings of doublets are interpreted as the meanings of single-characters, which are the subjective errors of later generations of interpreters; the remaining 5.66% are only associated with proclitics and enclitics rather than single-characters. Finally, the article proposes that doublets originate from a unique mechanism of expressive morphology, which is a new type of etymological theory outside the morphological grammar system, and can create various polysyllabic ideophones, including the onomatopoeia or mimetic words. The article proves that a language begins with the creation of words. In the prehistoric period before the oracle bone inscriptions, Chinese ancestors had invented a large number of distinctive doublets (AA), couplets (AB) and other polysyllabic words (xA, or ABB, ABA’B), or ideophones. Due to the difficulty of writing, the doublets were hidden in spoken language for hundreds of years. It was not until the time of “Book of Poetry” and “Book of History” in the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty that it entered the history and has continued to this day. Doublets are the earliest Chinese words and the beginning of Chinese civilization.
The Han Chinese (HAN) represent the world’s largest ethnic group, and their genetic structure has been the focus of numerous studies. Yet previous studies failed to draw out finer population stratification of patrilineal HAN, due to limitations in sample size and genetic marker density. This essay employs a Y-haplogroup frequency dataset from virtually whole China aiming to draw out a detailed genetic structure of the patrilineal HAN. We provide an overview of the Y chromosome haplogroup distributions, and find that the patrilineal HAN can be divided into five geographic subgroups. Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) provided further support for the five-substructure model. By comparing patrilineal and matrilineal descent, we revealed stronger geographical aggregation for patrilineal HAN. Moreover, populations with patrilineal descent showed lower levels of haplogroup diversity (HD) compared to those with matrilineal descent, suggesting potential population bottleneck of patrilineal HAN. The larger HD among northern patrilines verified historical migration of HAN from north to south, which validated by neighbor joining tree (NJ-tree). Overall, we speculate the southward migration routes for Han Chinese, and the HAN south of the Nanling Mountains may have entered via the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, rather than via eastern coastal provinces.
Chinese people believe that they are descendants of the prehistory Emperors Yan and Huang, while Yan (hot/red) and Huang (yellow) are the colors of the sun and earth. In the Dahecun style of Yangshao Culture archaeological culture of the legendary Yan and Huang’s period, the patterns of the sun and earth were frequently painted on the religious potteries, implying that the paired symbols might refer to the two emperors. However, the same paired pattern appeared in Shangshan Culture much earlier than Yangshao, indicating that the worship of Sun-Earth might have a quite long history prior to the two emperors. The pattern was inherited in the populations of China till today. The Jade Bi-Cong group of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age China also showed the same meanings and shapes. We found that the Sun-Earth pattern was quite common on the traditional brocade belts woven in the countryside around Shanghai. The origin of the sun shape was easy to understand, while that of the earth shape, a cross with or without an outline square, was hard to trace. Recent archaeological discovery in Shangshan Culture of a kind of yellow pyramid stone provided a new clue to the origin of earth symbol.
Inscribed symbols of Neolithic Age were sometimes suspected to be initial writing prior to developed writing system. The earliest developed writing system in China was Oracle-bone inscriptions (OBIs) of Bronze Age and researchers have long sought its predecessor. Here, we reported that two continuous symbols on a stone ax of Neolithic Liangzhu culture found their identical duplicates in a unique writing system on brocade belts woven by present women in Shanghai suburb. Women in this group duplicated the hereditary text for weddings only once each generation in the past, and they can still interpret these two characters, implying that the two identical Liangzhu symbols may have the similar meanings. The meanings and patterns are both similar to those in OBIs, suggesting that Liangzhu symbols might be one of the predecessors of OBIs. Integrating philology, genetics, linguistics, and folklore, we discussed that special small population may inherit both the genetic structure and convert culture for extremely long time, such as this population in southern Shanghai.
