by the editor

April 7, 2000: The National Geographic Society admitted that a fossil hailed as evidence that birds descended from dinosaurs was a composite of two different animals.
April 21, 2000: A computer scan of a dinosaur fossil, which researchers had previously claimed had a heart and therefore was warm-blooded, revealed the heart to be nothing more than a clump of minerals that misled researchers. [Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2000]
November 9, 2000: Tohoku Paleolithic Institute in Japan fired archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura after he was caught planting stone artifacts, a practice that had been going on for two decades.
November 26, 2000: Canadian scientists indicate that an earlier report claiming a reptile fossil had wings was erroneous. The "feathers" were found to be scales.
December 8, 2000: 200-million year old fossil on display at the National Museum in Wales was found to be a forgery.
Piltdown man: a combination of a modern human skull and orang-utan jaw, revealed as a fraud in 1953, 40 years after its discovery. Nebraska man: based upon one tooth found in 1921, which actually belonged to a pig-like animal. Drawings of a hairy animal were erroneously published. Java man: Admittedly its teeth were probably from a orang-utan and its long-leg bone was more recent than its skull. Lucy: French researchers no longer consider this specimen, found in 1974, to be a direct human ancestor.
[Associated Press, February 7, 2001] Neanderthal man: once shown in biology textbooks as the missing link and estimated to have lived 100,000-200,000 years ago, it was thought to be an extinct species that was not a descendant of modern man. But the discovery of a fossil with combined features of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal, coupled with discoveries of bone flutes, spears and other tools, appears to indicate Neanderthals were human contemporaries of modern man. [Scientific American, November 8, 1999]

Already in Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine" the quest for the peopling of the earth was given special importance. And although racial nationalisms of major states are in retreat, yielding to a more civic nationalism in which  citizenship is less imprecated with, although never fully detached from concepts of racial ties. One can in some instances find the same tendency as I am describing in the third editorial placed on-line parallel to this article as to how modern notions of religion, language, race, and gender are constructed in the process of forming the nation state with theories about the peopling of the earth  even to date.
Approaches to antiquity that begin  with ethnic homogeneity and read these into the past are common. Israeli scholars have used prehistory to prove the right of the Israeli people to live in the Promised Land, while ignoring the common "Semitic" heritage. In Korea (north and south), notions of  "eternal Koreaness" impel to dispute Japanese claims that deny the continuous  'Koreaness" of all present-day Korea.
Contemporary genetic studies have been used for nationalist ends.  For example, in Japan, social conflict is held to be avoidable because the people are deemed homogeneously descended from the "original japanese".
Funding  for archeological research thus centers on "Japanese origins". (Clare Fawcett, Nationalism and  postwar Japanese Archeology", 1995) 
Israel's Advisors for Scientific Affairs argued that the Palestiniana of Gaza were foreign to the area because they share a specific DNA sequence with inhabitants of northern Syria.
Some advocates of Taiwan independence have alleged that genetic studies show that Taiwanese are distinct from mainlanders in being defined by "aboriginal genes" not found on the mainland. Meanwhile, reunification advocates argue for the northern Chinese origins of  Taiwan's aborigines, and the PRC  publicizes fossil studies that claim that the earliest "Taiwan man" came from the mainland in the last Ice Age. (Xinhua, 20 September 1999: "Early Man of Taiwan Comes from Chinese Mainland")
PRC sources argue that genetic similarities between Han and Tibetans and differences between Tibetans and Nepalis and Indians underscore the "blood relationship" among China's ethnic groups. The Dalai Lama counters that by stating that "archeological findings have revealed that the Tibetans and Chinese have been two distinct people since the dawn of human civilization" (Dalai Lama, "The Importance of Indian Initiative on Tibet." Tibetan Bulletin, July-August: 1, 1993.)
The centrality of myths of origin and descent in state racial nationalist projects has led proponents to incorporate prestigious individuals, peoples, and even fossils into "race"-based metahistories. Paleoanthropologists and archeologists have often vouched for these claims.
European scholars long maintained that the ancient Greeks were Nordic migrants and that ancient Egyptians were "white", despite the latter's part in African biocultural history.
Chinese reformer Liang Qichao claimed that because of its supposed founding by "Huns" (actually the Magyars) in the tenth century, Hungary's Golden Bull, which he inaccurately claimed antedated the Magna Carta, showed that it was the "yellow race" that  first established a civilized polity in the world. (Robert Scalpino and george Yu, "Modern China and its Revolutionary Process", 1985)
Most Chinese scholars reject the "Out of Africa" hypothesis in favor of an extreme polygenic approach to human evolution. They take the view that the earliest humans originated within the borders of present-day China. Jia Lanpo, the dean of Chinese archeologists, pegs the Qinghai-Tibet plateau as the likely place of origin.
Already the Nazis attempted to find the original Aryans in Tibet. By the time Hitler wrote" Mein Kampf" the myth of the Aryan race was fully developed. (see editorial two and three) For Hitler the only solution to the mingling of "Aryan and Jewish" blood was for the tainted Germans to find the wellsprings of Aryan blood. In search for "contact with the Aryans", Tibet-long isolated, seemed a likely candidate. Already Blavatsky wrote in the Secret Doctrine that the Aryans descended from the north pole all the way down to India.
The leader of the German Mission where Dr. Ernst Schaefer, and Dr. Bruno Beger. Even before Schaefer´s mission was announced, Beger had proposed an expedition to map the characteristics of the peoples of eastern Tibet to ascertain whether they were originally Aryans. The SS-Ahnenerbe was involved in the mapping of different racial groups. Its members believed that they could classify races into two types: those with Aryan heritage. The latter were to be eliminated. These ideas were the impetus behind both the Holocaust and the Schaefer mission to Lhasa in 1938-39.
Some Nazi militarists imagined Tibet as a potential base for attacking British India, and hoped that this mission would lead to some form of alliance with the Tibetans. In that they were partly successful. The mission was received by the Teting Regent (who had led Tibet since the death of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1933), and it did succeed in persuading the Regent  to correspond with Adolf Hitler.
Other PRC scholars favor present day Guizhou province. Official sources proclaim Wushan Man discovered in 1986 the "Chinese people's earliest human ancestor that walked upright" (Xinhua, 4 January 1997.)
Genetic research unveiled on Thursday provides compelling support for the theory that anatomically modern humans rose out of Africa in the past 100,000 years and swept aside populations of archaic humans, with no inter-breeding.
A team of Chinese and American geneticists obtained blood samples from more than 12,000 men from across east Asia and examined characteristic DNA sequences called markers on the Y chromosome (the male chromosome). The Y chromosome is considered one of the most powerful molecular tools for tracing human evolutionary history because it remains unchanged over eons when passed from father to son. The researchers found that every one of the men could trace his ancestry to forefathers who lived in Africa over the past 35,000 to 89,000 years. They also found absolutely no genetic evidence that the modern people (Homo sapiens) mated with archaic humans (Homo erectus) that already lived in Asia, having migrated from Africa about 1 million years ago. The findings, appearing in the journal Science, appeared to confirm, be it tentatively,  the so-called out-of-Africa theory.