If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.
Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.
China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.
The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.
Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?
(not an archeologist but fascinated)
That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.
I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
Without being ad hom, the Chinese view is culturally informed for domestic political reasons. My view is to ask if even after reduction of (sub) speciation labels their view remains tenable, and there is a case to be made for East West cultural dispersion before historic time. Given out of Africa, at least some ground state of flow is west east.
It apears it only goes to back to the 19th century, and may be connected with the case of Phineas Gage, who miraculously survived massive brain damage.
Basically, it seems that we are ruled by a crazy cult.
What I claim is, that the cerebellum is a statistical machine, which is fundamentally limited by the fact that it gets overwhelmed by spurious correlations once it gets too powerful, and it begins to hallucinate.
Mammals evolved the neocoretex, a data reduction machine, which resolves this problem by reducing a large amount of inputs into a much smaller number of values that carry all the information. When the cerebellum acts only in this latent space, and is thus restricted by what can be represented within this latent space, it can be powerful, and avoid hallucination.
The more "counterintuitive" situations the creature has to deal with, the bigger neocortex/cerebellum ratio it needs to avoid hallucinating.
Thus when a person's neocortex gets damaged, they become what may seem like super smart, they make insane conclusions and appear to be able to understand anything, but none of it is actually real, and they are just insane.
What they seem to believe (which is not shared publicly, because it would get "misinterpreted, but allows to be acknowledged internally) is that as animals got too intelligent they failed to breed, but intelligence is still good for not dying. And the neocortex evolved to keep us dumb so that we could breed, and only lift its veil in times of dire need, so that we could use our intelligence to survive. And so, they concluded that they can create a supersmart race by destroying our neocortexes with various means, so that we can be smart all the time, not only in emergencies, and gigantic progress would result.
In reality, they made most people insane.