White people, the ancestors of today's East Asian residents, arrived in the region some 19,000 years ago and thus replaced the mysterious people who lived there before them, according to a new study. Scientists learned about these mysterious people by comparing the genetics of "Tianyuan Man," a 40,000-year-old individual found in the Tianyuan Cave in Beijing, with the DNA of ancient human remains belonging to 25 people from the Amur region, which includes parts of eastern China and Russia. The team found that the ancestors of Tianyuan man were likely widely distributed in East Asia between 40,000 and 33,000 years ago. However, around 19,000 years ago, the population disappeared and a new one appeared in its place, just before the end of the last glaciation maximum (LGM) - when the ice caps reached their maximum extent from about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, said the study's senior author, Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.