Remains found in China could lead to new human species
Baku, March 16 (AZERTAC). An Australian scientist is leading a team trying to determine if remains found in China could be a new human species.
A previously unknown type of human -jut-jawed, heavy-browed, deer-eating cave dwellers-may have been identified via Stone Age bones from southern China, according to a new study conducted by a team of Chinese and Australian researchers.
The "mystery human fossils" might even represent an entirely new species that existed alongside our own as recently as 11,500 years ago, according to a team of Chinese and Australian researchers.
When Professor Darren Curnoe first saw a large lump of rock that had been lying forgotten for more than 30 years in the basement of an archaeological institute in China, he got a huge surprise. “I could see the top of a human skull sitting out of it,” the Sydney scientist recalls. “After I`d picked up my own jaw, I asked, `What`s this?` ”Curnoe`s collaborator, Professor Ji Xueping, of Yunnan University in Kunming, explained the block of sediment had been removed from a cave near the village of Longlin in 1979 and been in storage ever since. An expert was flown in to help remove the remains, which included a partial skeleton, and Curnoe discovered they were in luck again. “Within the cavity of the skull, sitting in the sediment, was some charcoal, which was fantastic.” Radiocarbon dating was carried out in Sydney, at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. A different kind of dating was also conducted on some flowstone sitting on top of the skull, confirming it had belonged to someone who lived as recently as 11,500 years ago. But this was no ordinary person. The skull had a “unique mosaic of features”, both primitive and modern.
Along with similar remains from at least three individuals who lived about 14,500 years ago, which had been unearthed at Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, near the city of Mengzi, it presented Curnoe and his colleagues with a gigantic puzzle. “They were certainly Homo. But the question is whether they were Homo sapiens [our species] or something else,” he said. Some features, such as a jutting jaw that lacks a modern chin, were similar to those of human ancestors from several hundreds of thousands of years ago, such as Homo erectus. The Red Deer Cave people, as they have been dubbed, also had prominent brows and very large molar teeth. “And the skull bones are quite thick, which is a primitive characteristic,” remarked Curnoe. Their flat, short faces, however, were tucked under the frontal lobe of the brain, “which is a modern human characteristic.” A CT scan carried out on a cranium from Maludong suggests these people had a moderate-size brain with a modern-looking frontal lobe, but primitive-looking parietal lobes on the side. “It is quite unique and perplexing” said Curnoe. Modern humans are thought to have evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago and then left the Middle East to travel to Australia about 70,000 years ago. One possibility for the Red Deer Cave people is that they were descendants of a group of modern humans who made an even earlier exodus from Africa and settled in China, before the ancestors of people living there today arrived.
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