It also "muddies the waters" on long-standing assumptions that early humans dispersed from Africa, said Michael Petraglia, director of Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, who was not involved in the study.
"There's a big change potentially happening here, where east Asia is now playing a very key role in hominin evolution," he told the Agence France-Presse.
Yeah, I've always thought it was like how we thought there were "cavemen" when caves were just a great place to preserve archeological evidence.
Humans have been thru a lot of ice ages, and Africa is like the place to ride out an ice age. Especially the recent ones where the Sarrah was a rainforest.
It's incredibly possible that hominids evolved somewhere else, and just died out everywhere except Africa. And even more likely that if it happened once, it happened multiple times.
Doesn't change anything, all modern humans almost definitely came from Africa, it's just that we don't know for sure where we came from first. It's just kind of a chicken/egg thing anyways.