The authors publishing this are members of school of thought not widely accepted in modern Anthropology. They argue that humans in modern East Asia are "primarily" descended from local archaic hominins, not "primarily" from humans out of Africa that admixed with archaic hominins as they migrated around the world.

This paper is specifically an argument for a "missing link" between archaic H. erectus and modern human morphologies, which pushes the emergence of these features back before Out-Of-Africa. So they avoid those terms because they're semantic distinctions the authors don't fully recognize.

I see, the old "China was first" that mix a pinch of science with a little of politics. Is an old anthropological war but Africa and Europe provided much more evidence until today If I remember correctly.

Even if they don't recognize neanderthals, is a well established taxon, and this does not differ a lot of them (in my non expert opinion), so they should show why this is enough different to deserve a second "oriental neanderthal" species. I can imagine easily neanderthals following migrating animals and conquering most of the northern hemisphere just walking from Atlantic to Pacific coasts in several generations.

>> so they should show why this is enough different t

In politics you don't need that. Just see how some political leaders avoid mentioning "sensitive" words (i.e the name of the opponent, climate change etc) for their target audience.

Maybe that missing link had a more like Winnie the Pooh-like appearance?

It's pretty clearly what used to be called "archaic Homo sapiens", which is split today into at least Neanderthals, Denisovans, and "other". The article said they ruled out Denisovan, but didn't say on what basis. Denisovan morphology is not well known; the species/subspecies is defined mainly on a genetic basis. This article only looks at morphology, so all they really can be saying is that this mandible doesn't look just like the one known Denisovan partial mandible.

I think future techniques will be able to extract DNA from things up to 1 million years old. Sure, DNA breaks down in the environment, but when you start with 60,000,000,000,000 copies of a genome in a human, I think there is a very high chance that enough fragments of that will remain to reconstruct one copy - the only hurdle is coming up with a method to do it practically.

In a hypothetical world where we could have infinite compute power and a map of the exact location of every atom in a skull, I don't think there would be any issue getting a DNA sequence.

Then we can draw the full family tree and know for sure.

DNA has a ~500 year half life.

For a 300,000 year old copy of a genome to survive there’d need to be 2^600 copies to begin with.

But thats of the whole DNA molecule. When it breaks down, the small chunks leftover still contain fragments of information.

> 2^600 is approximately 1e19.

No, it's approximately 1e180. You're off by 160 orders of magnitude.

But those 3000 bodies don't have exactly the same genomes obviously. In fact half of them won't even share one of the chromosomes.

It'll be hard to recombine this into a clear picture as you won't know which sequences are common and which are individual.

That isn’t a problem at all, you will get a consensus sequence along with additional information about which variants differ in the population. That is even better info than a single perfect genome sequence.

Not impossible but there are risks in that plan. We could be in a similar problem than chatGPT is having, where part of the combinations would end being wrong and generating newer info, that would reinforce the error.