A few days back we heard a report from the Bacho Kiro cave in the Balkans. At least 43kBC so, just before the Laschamps flip. Related to the famous Oase, down to the recent Neander mix - in Bacho Kiro's case, about six generations.
The genome looks greater Eurasian - it matches East Asians (and Native Americans). This is the Tianyuan signal. Presumably this is that portion of the American genome which isn't from Mal'ta Boy who comes, of course, much later.
Europeans as we know them, both Gravettian and that Aurignacian revival called Magdalenian / Solutrean [UPDATE 5/5/22 west], are unrelated to this lot. Apparently the palaeos'd used some carbon-based glue so they cannot radiocarbon this specimen. But given its context and certainly given its nature, it cannot be Gravettian and it's more likely pre-Aurignacian. Note that Upper Palaeolithic before 45 kBC, in Europe, is near-pure Neander; no modern human is detected here, beyond the ancient Eemian intrusions into that (Vindija) Neander genome. The cave caught this specimen within a few centuries of arrival.
As of then, every Eurasian was still a carnivore. Africans were moving to an omnivorous diet, but not yet we Eurasians: not in the Balkans, not in China.
As for how this tribe got wiped from the genetic record: this aligns with earlier observations about Sundaland Man. Our ancestors did it. I'm going on a limb and saying that we Sundalanders, by parallel or independently, were learning to eat plants - by which I mean, plantains, and yams, and other starch/sugar vegetables.
UPDATE 11/14: On false starts. Maybe Bacho Kiro (and Oase) suffered even worse from the magnetic distortions than the Neanders did, and blended in with the orks.
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