Ancient Human Ancestor Lived Longer Than Previously Thought

However, based on the 14,000 year old archaic thigh bone, not only have there been many species of human throughout the course of history, but this new discovery shows that some species were alive at the same time.

The team has suggested in another recent PLoS ONE paper that the skull from Longlin Cave in China is probably a hybrid between anatomically modern Homo sapiens and an unknown archaic group – perhaps even the one represented by the femur from Maludong.

David Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, stated that he was not convinced by the new discovery.

The team announced their Red Deer Cave discovery in 2012, sparking controversy and speculation that the bones could represent an unknown new species.

On the other hand, scientists point out that given that just one small bone fragment has been found, it would be inadvisable to jump to conclusions or place too much emphasis on this singular discovery.

However, if contesters are actually wrong, and several species of humans did live at the same time, in the late stages of our evolution, questions abound as to how it was possible just for Homo sapiens to emerge victorious at the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago.

Yunnan province, the region of China where the remains were discovered, is also home to other unique species due to its geographic isolation and the presence of natural boundaries such as mountains, valleys and rivers. The region around Maludong is also biogeographically on the northern edge of tropical Southeast Asia and many species found there today are very ancient indeed. Those ancient humans were thought to have died out when modern humans evolved but the latest dating and analysis of a thigh bone from the Chinese cave suggests otherwise.

“Without the more diagnostic parts of the bone, like the head of the femur and a complete neck and more of the shaft”, he says, “it’s just very very hard to say anything about a specimen like that”. Because of how damaged and fragmentary the bone is, the measurements could be erroneous, he added. Why did they survive so late? It indeed seems that archaic humans may have lived alongside the oldest modern humans.

However, the results from the assessment of a thigh bone found in Maludong indicated a close resemblance to very ancient human species, like early Homo erectus or Homo habilis – which lived around 1.5 million years or more ago in Africa.

The researchers reconstructed the body mass, which summed up to about 50 kilograms, which was quite small for by pre-modern and Ice Age human standards. The fact is that we’ve really only scratched the surface in East Asia. Found in 2003 in Indonesia, H. floresienses stood between three and four feet tall and possessed many characteristics that differentiated them from modern humans, such as their lack of a defined chin. There may have been a diversity of different kinds of human living until very recently in southwest China.

Dr Curnoe cautioned it was only one bone, so they need to proceed carefully, but if the bone is authentic, it means there must have been an overlap of archaic and modern humans for tens of thousands of years in southwest China.

“But unlike them, it provides a much clearer indication of what at least some of the Red Deer Cave people bones might be”.