The disputes around the place of fossils from China in the human evolutionary record are not incidental. These finds demonstrate numerous progressive traits, which, however, are interpreted differently, and the experts’ views are highly divergent. Some believe that H. heidelbergensis originated in sub-Saharan Africa, from whence it dispersed over vast areas of Eurasia (Stringer, 1990; Rightmire, 2001). Others express an opposite idea: H. heidelbergensis allegedly originated in East Asia, and then migrated westward up to Africa (Etler, 2010). The archaeological data do not support either of these hypotheses since neither in China nor in territories intermediate between East Asia and Africa, no cultural changes suggestive of either a westward or an eastward migration have been registered. Does this imply that the migration took place by air? In my view, only one interpretation is possible: progressive biological traits are due to parallel evolution. Both in East Asia and in Africa, anatomically modern humans apparently originated from the same ancestral species – Homo erectus sensu lato.

In sum, progressive traits in East Asian fossils dating to 300–150 ka BP indicate progressive evolution in situ. The idea that H. heidelbergensis migrated to China from the west is disproved by the entire archaeological record. This is yet another example of physical anthropologists’ reckoning without cultural facts.

The evidence speaks in favor of a progressive in situ evolution of Homo erectus in East and Southeast Asia over a span of more than one million years. This does not preclude the immigration of small populations from adjacent regions, small-scale gene flow, or admixture. Differences between the geographically separated late archaic opulations were apparently caused by isolation. This is evidenced by finds from Ngandong, Java. Having preserved several distinctive features of H. erectus, they reveal marked progressive traits as well while differing from the broadly contemporaneous fossils from China. Over a period of one million years, natural selection and other evolutionary forces may have eventually led to the transformation of H. erectus populations of China into modern Mongoloid groups, and those of Java, into Australoid groups.

An important argument favoring the theory of the autochthonous evolution of human populations in China are new absolute dates relating to seven Paleolithic sites where Homo sapiens remains were found (Shen, Michel, 2007). These dates were derived from teeth and other remains. The dates are quite early and suggest that anatomically modern humans lived in China at least 100 ka BP (Ibid.: 162).