Social sciences Archaeology

New findings from a cave in northern Laos add to a growing body of evidence that modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia over 80,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

A team of international researchers, led by Associate Professor Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum, have discovered that the oldest type of poultry ever domesticated may have been geese. The study involved interdisciplinary research of bones excavated from Tianluoshan site in the lower Yangtze River valley, Zhejiang Province, China.

A long-standing hypothesis, the dual-structure model, posits that Japanese populations derive dual ancestry from indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers and succeeding Yayoi farmers. We conduct paleogenomic analyses of people of the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods from Japanese archaeological sites. We identify a later influx of East Asian ancestry in the Kofun period and clarify that the genome of the modern Japanese population is composed of three ancestral components, proposing a tripartite model of Japanese origins.

Researchers in the USA and Japan say they may have found the cause of the first mass extinction of life.