Convoluted human evolution: Another recent hominin? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 31, 2015, 15:21 (3251 days ago) @ David Turell

New findings in China suggest another late surviving hominin like the Hobbits. Again the Red Deer Cave discovery:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22930543-500-new-species-of-human-may-have-shared-our-caves-and-beds/-"WE MAY have lived alongside an archaic human species just 10,500 years ago in China. Controversial bone discoveries suggest we even interbred with and cannibalised these mystery hominins.-***-"One of the most exciting finds is a hominin femur found in Muladong cave in south-west China, alongside other human and animal bones. It shows evidence of having been burned in a fire that was used for cooking other meat, and has marks consistent with it being butchered. It has also been broken in a way that is used to access bone marrow. Unusually, it has been painted with a red clay called ochre, associated with burial rituals (PLoS One, doi.org/97c).-"Things got more interesting when the team tried to identify the bone. “Our work shows clearly that the femur resembles archaic humans,” says Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who led the team behind the discoveries. Yet the sediment the bone was found in dates to just 14,000 years ago. This would make it the most recent human species to go extinct. 
 
"The shaft of the bone is very narrow and it has a thin outer layer. There is also a notch where muscle would have joined the bone that is much larger than in anatomically modern humans, and it faces more towards the back of the bone. “These features suggest it walked differently,” says Curnoe. And judging by the bone's size, he estimates an adult would have weighed 50 kilograms - much smaller than other known Ice Age humans.-“'When you put all the evidence together the femur comes out quite clearly resembling the early members of Homo,” says Curnoe. This includes the earliest human species, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, which lived some 2 million years ago.-"If confirmed, says Petraglia, this would change our understanding of human evolution.-"Besides Homo floresiensis, also known as “the Hobbit”, which was confined to an Indonesian island up to around 18,000 years ago, the most recent archaic humans were thought to be the Denisovans and Neanderthals, which became extinct soon after we came through their lands some 40,000 years ago.-“'This turns that on its head,” says Curnoe. “Its young age shows that remarkably primitive-looking humans must have shared the landscape with very modern-looking people at a time when China's earliest farming cultures were beginning to flourish.”-"But some in the field have doubts that such a young bone can be from something so archaic. “It is not an archaic human,” says Erik Trinkaus at Washington University in St Louis. He thinks the differences in the bone are a result of natural variation within a population, not a new species.-"Henry McHenry at the University of California, Davis, is more ambivalent. He says the femur looks very odd, but that it does seem to have similarities to very archaic humans.-"Supporting evidence comes from Longlin cave, a few hundred kilometres north (see map), where a stash of human bones, including an almost complete skull, were found - some in 1979. Curnoe and Ji Xueping at the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in China re-analysed these bones and dug up more, describing them in 2012.FIG-mg30543501.jpg-"Their analysis suggests the bones belong to a hybrid of our species and something more archaic - probably the hominin that once walked on the now-painted femur. They have preliminarily dated the hybrid to just 10,500 years ago. One of the bones had been cut and had holes dug near its top, suggesting it was used as a vessel for carrying and drinking liquid.-"What all this hints at, Curnoe and colleagues say, is that Homo sapiens was mating with an archaic human species, possibly eating them, and using the hybrid offspring bones as tools. But to back up these claims, we will need DNA evidence, says Petraglia."-Comment: Human evolution came from a bush of types?