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China's Earliest Modern Human Found
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonized the East. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
AIUI (I'm not an evolutionary biologist, although my girlfriend is) the environmental pressures which gave rise to homo sapiens in Africa also occurred among simian populations elsewhere, so that human-like characteristics arose independently among multiple populations (h. neanderthalis in Europe, for example). Through interbreeding and competition, there's now a single species, h. sapiens sapiens. Although some of the characteristics of our species are apparently or allegedly tracable to interbreeding events, for instance I've heard that red/ginger hair among Europeans can be linked to Neanderthalis genes.