Like everybody else, I have always wondered why the Chinese have such sharply different physical attributes than the rest of the world. Shorter statures, sunken eyes, flatter cheekbones and so on. I was watching BBC's "The Incredible Human Journey" documentary, episode 2 that studies this very subject.
It has been a popular theory and one strongly believed by the Chinese themselves that they have descended from called Homo erectus rather than the Homo sapiens from which the rest of humanity evolved. Chinese anthropologists and palaeontologists have shown modern Chinese physical characteristics in the fossil skulls, such as broad cheek bones, cranial skull shape and shovel-shaped incisors that are absent in almost all other humans. The stone tools found in China seem more primitive than those elsewhere, and infers that they were made exclusively by Homo erectus.
The study initially hypothesised that the modern Chinese population evolved from homo erectus in China but concluded that the Chinese people did in fact evolve and migrate from Africa like the rest of world's population. But, it was a was a group of homo erecti (plural ? ) who had moved out of Africa to the rest of the world. In Europe, Homo erectus evolved to homo sapiens. But what if, homo erectus that moved to Asia never evolved to homo sapiens and modern Chinese are direct descendants from erectus?
Several genetic studies have also shown that although the DNA of modern Chinese match those of the species that left Africa, it also states that it bears no similarity to the homo sapiens DNA.
Is there any conclusive proof or theory to support or discard this theory?