Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

East Asia—the vast region encompassing China, Japan, and Southeast Asia—is one of the great theaters of human evolution. It harbors more than one third of the world’s population and a similar fraction of its language diversity. Pottery was first invented there at least nineteen thousand years ago.1 It was the jumping-off point for the peopling of the Americas before fifteen thousand years ago. East Asia witnessed an independent and early invention of agriculture around nine thousand years ago. East Asia has been home to the human family for at least around 1.7 million years, the date of the oldest known Homo erectus skeleton found in China.2 The earliest human remains excavated in Indonesia are similarly old.3 Archaic humans—whose skeletal form is not the same as that of humans whose anatomically modern features begin to appear in the African fossil record after around three hundred thousand years ago4—have lived in East Asia continuously since those times.