May
30
/ 2025
In the mountainous jungles of Yunnan Province, where the snow-fed rivers of the Tibetan Plateau crash into the subtropical forests of Southeast Asia, ancient human history has just revealed another of its long-buried secrets. From sediments and skeletons thousands of years old, scientists have sequenced the DNA of 127 ancient individuals, uncovering deep-rooted population diversity and ghost lineages that challenge long-standing assumptions about the origins of East Asian peoples. The research, published in Science, and conducted by Fu Qiaomei at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, finds that Yunnan—Southwest China's highland border—is a central missing puzzle piece in the complicated ancestry of both Tibetan and Austroasiatic peoples. The research extends far beyond the boundaries of China, providing new routes of ancient
