The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China

. . . the authors provide a detailed description of the remains, state of preservation, anatomy, body proportions, and pathologies. . . provides a balanced coverage of both who was Tianyuan (definitely a modern human), but also a little bit of how he or she lived. . . meticulous descriptions and analyses.--Brigitte M. Holt, assistant professor of anthropology, University of Massachusetts "The human remains found in Tianyuan Cave near Zhoukoudian, Beijing include more than thirty pieces of mandible, teeth, postcranial bones. The direct AMS dating on the human bone gives an age about 40 ka making the Tianyuan Cave among the groups of early modern humans in East Asia. The authors give detailed morphological and metric descriptions for the Tianyuan human remains in this manuscript. In addition, several issues of late Pleistocene human evolution are addressed."--Liu Wu, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China "Not only does this detailed monograph on Tianyuan stand as an excellent example of high-quality description and analysis of important human fossils, it also provides, for the first time, reliably dated evidence on the initial appearance of early modern people on the East Asian mainland. Thus, this work will have a significant impact on our understanding of later human evolution in Asia for many years to come, regardless of individual views on evidence for continuity between early modern and archaic Asians."--Fred Smith, professor of anthropology and Biological Sciences Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University