Human evolution: another far eastern Hobbit-like Group (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 22, 2021, 01:11 (1311 days ago) @ David Turell

In the Philippines in a cave in Luzon:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/new-species-ancient-human-discovered...

"Humankind's tangled shrub of ancestry now has a new branch: Researchers in the Philippines announced today that they have discovered a species of ancient human previously unknown to science.

"The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones—hosts a patchwork of ancient and more advanced features. The landmark discovery, announced in Nature on Wednesday, makes Luzon the third Southeast Asian island in the last 15 years to bear signs of unexpectedly ancient human activity.

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"In 2010, Mijares and his colleagues unveiled the 67,000-year-old fossil, which they tentatively suggested belonged to a small-bodied member of Homo sapiens, making it perhaps the oldest sign of our species anywhere in the Philippines at the time. But Mijares suspected that it might actually belong to a new species, maybe even a Luzon analog to H. floresiensis. The team needed more fossils to be sure.

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"As luck would have it, excavations uncovered two more toe bones along with seven teeth, two finger bones, and part of a femur on return trips to Callao Cave in 2011 and 2015. In all, the remains represent at least three individuals.

"The small fossils' curves and grooves reveal an unexpected mix of both ancient and more advanced traits. The teeth's small sizes and relatively simple shapes, for instance, point to a more “modern” individual, but one upper premolar has three roots—a trait found in fewer than 3 percent of modern humans. And one foot bone resembles those of the ancient australopithecines, a group that includes the famous human relative Lucy, who trekked across Africa roughly three million years ago.

“'I agree with [the] authors that the combination of features is like nothing we have seen before,” says María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution.

"New York University anthropologist Shara Bailey, an expert on ancient teeth, notes that South Africa's Homo naledi—discovered by a team including National Geographic grantee Lee Berger—also has features that look both ancient and modern. She takes the two discoveries as a sign that “mosaic” evolution was more common among hominins than once thought.

"Martinón-Torres further suggests that the mix of dental features somewhat resembles that seen in 15,000-year-old hominin remains from Dushan in southern China, which she and her colleagues recently described. Along with H. luzonensis, the discoveries join recent finds hinting that by 12,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene epoch drew to a close, hominins in Asia had a startling amount of diversity.

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"There's also evidence that H. luzonensis, or another ancient hominin, lived on Luzon even further back in time. In 2018, Mijares and his colleagues announced the discovery of stone tools and a butchered rhinoceros skeleton that are more than 700,000 years old, found not too far from Callao Cave. Because of the time gap between the remains and the tool site, however, it's tough to say whether the stone tool users were predecessors of H. luzonensis or an unrelated hominin.

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"Another major unknown is how the ancestors of H. luzonensis even reached the Philippines. In 2016, researchers unveiled stone tools on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that date to between 118,000 and 194,000 years old—or at least 60,000 years older than the island's oldest known modern humans. Taken alongside the remains from Flores and Luzon, the sites suggest that ancient hominin dispersal throughout the region wasn't necessarily as rare—or as accidental—as researchers once thought.

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"One thing remains clear: Southeast Asia probably was home to more hominin species than current fossils let on. For his part, Mijares is continuing to look for other signs of H. luzonensis, including a current search at Luzon's Biak na Bato National Park, done with support from the National Geographic Society. Through it all, Mijares sees the future for H. luzonensis—and for Asian anthropology—as bright."

Comment: our evolution is convoluted and obviously our ancestors wandered all over the place, even across oceans. But the main line is still erectus to sapiens