Quote:Ancient Skull Found in China Is Unlike Any Human Seen Before

'An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin
found before. It resembles neither the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor us, suggesting
our current version of the human family tree needs another branch.

The jaw, skull, and leg bones belonging to this yet-to-be classified hominin, labeled HLD 6, were discovered in
Hualongdong, in East Asia, in 2019. In the years since, experts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have
struggled to match the remains to a known lineage.

The hominin's face is similarly structured to that of the modern human lineage, which split from Homo erectus as
far back as 750,000 years ago. But the individual's lack of chin appears more like that of a Denisovan – an extinct
species of ancient hominin in Asia that split from Neanderthals more than 400,000 years ago.

Working alongside researchers from China's Xi'an Jiaotong University, the UK's University of York, and Spain's
National Research Center on Human Evolution, researchers at CAS think they have uncovered an entirely new
lineage – a hybrid between the branch that gave us modern humans and the branch that gave us other ancient
hominins in the region, like Denisovans.


(Top) Skull of the ancient hominin from China.
(Centre) The skull and jaws of HLD 6.
(Bottom) Family tree of early humans that may have lived in Eurasia more than 50,000 years ago.

Historically, many hominin fossils from the Pleistocene that have been found in China haven't fitted easily into any
one lineage. As a result, such remains are often explained away as intermediate variations on a straight path to
modern humanity; as an archaic example of a Homo sapien, for example, or an advanced form of Homo erectus.

But this rather linear, simplistic interpretation is controversial and not widely accepted. While Homo erectus did
persist in Indonesia until roughly 100,000 years ago, the remains that were recently found in East China hold a
greater resemblance to other, more modern lineages of hominin.

Previously, genome studies on Neanderthal remains in Europe and western Asia have found evidence of a fourth
lineage of hominin living in the Middle to Late Pleistocene. But this missing group has never been officially identified
in the fossil record.

Perhaps the recent hominin remains found in China are a missing piece of the puzzle. The fossilized jaw and skull
belong to a 12- or 13-year-old, and while its face has modern-human like features, the limbs, skull cap, and jaw
"seem to reflect more primitive traits," the authors of the analysis write.


Their results complicate the path to modern humans. The mosaic of physical features found in this ancient hominin
instead supports the coexistence of three lineages in Asia – the lineage of H. erectus, the lineage of Denisovan, and
this other lineage that is "phylogenetically close" to us.

Homo sapiens only appeared in China around 120,000 years ago, but it seems as though some of our 'modern'
features existed here long before that. It may be that the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and Neanderthals
arose in southwest Asia and later spread to all continents.
That theory will now need to be confirmed with more archaeological research.

The study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution...'

Quote:

Opinion: Another Species of Hominin May Still Be Alive

'In 2004, the scientific world was shaken by the discovery of fossils from a tiny species of hominin
on the Indonesian island of Flores. Labeled Homo floresiensis and dating to the late Pleistocene,
the species was apparently a contemporary of early modern humans in this part of Southeast Asia.

Yet in certain respects the diminutive hominin resembled australopithecines and even chimpanzees.
Twenty years previously, when I began ethnographic fieldwork on Flores, I heard tales of humanlike
creatures, some still reputedly alive although very rarely seen.

In the words of the H. floresiensis discovery team’s leader, the late Mike Morwood, last at the University
of Wollongong in Australia, descriptions of these hominoids “fitted floresiensis to a T.” Not least because
the newly described fossil species was assumed to be extinct, I began looking for ways this remarkable
resemblance might be explained. The result is a book, Between Ape and Human, available in May 2022.

Coming from a professional anthropologist and ethnobiologist, my conclusions will probably surprise many.
They might even be more startling than the discovery of H. floresiensis—once described by paleoanthropologist
Peter Brown of the University of New England in New South Wales as tantamount to the discovery of a
space alien.

Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local
human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is
remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man. My aim in writing the
book was to find the best explanation—that is, the most rational and empirically best supported—of Lio
accounts of the creatures.

These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly.
And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived
on Flores to the present or very recent times.

Between Ape and Human also considers general questions, including how natural scientists construct
knowledge about living things. One issue is the relative value of various sources of information about
creatures, including animals undocumented or yet to be documented in the scientific literature, and
especially information provided by traditionally non-literate and technologically simple communities
such as the Lio—a people who, 40 or 50 years ago, anthropologists would have called primitive.

To be sure, the Lio don’t have anything akin to modern evolutionary theory, with speciation driven by
mutation and natural selection. But if evolutionism is fundamentally concerned with how different
species arose and how differences are maintained, then Lio people and other Flores islanders have
for a long time been asking the same questions.

Lio folk zoology and cosmology also include stories of natural beings, specifically humans, transforming
permanently into animals of other kinds. And they do this, in part, by moving into new environments and
adopting new ways of life, thus suggesting a qualified Lamarckism.

As my fieldwork revealed, such posited changes reflect local observations of similarities and differences
between a supposed ancestral species and its differentiated descendants. Like the majority of named
categories in Lio animal classification, these derivatives coincide with the species or genera of modern
systematics.

At the same time, Lio distinguish humans from nonhuman animals in much the same way as do modern
Westerners, that is, not just on morphological grounds but by attributing complex expressions of culture,
language, and technology exclusively to humans.

Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals,
a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as
does the biblical story of Genesis. Yet in all instances, the position confers on  Homo sapiens a unique
status, thereby separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

For the Lio, the ape-man’s appearance as something incompletely human makes the creature anomalous
and hence problematic and disturbing. For academic scientists, H. floresiensis is similarly problematic,
but not so much for its resemblance to H. sapiens; rather, it’s because the species appears very late in
the geological record, surviving to a time well after the appearance of modern humans.

Whether H. floresiensis would have been any harder (or easier) to accept had it been interpreted as a
bipedal ape rather than a species of human is difficult to say. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Morwood,
taking an implicitly unilinear view of hominin evolution and arguing for the species’ inclusion in Homo,
spoke of the evidence that the diminutive hominin walked the Earth relatively recently as one “good
reason” to classify H. floresiensis in our genus.

For this can only mean that, in the view of this author, what survives until recent times has to somehow
belong with us. 

As for ape-men, the Lio identify them as animals. In fact, they are one of several animals that Lio people
claim descended from humans. But this classification has nothing to do with geological dating or any
paleoanthropological evidence.

Instead, Lio people, who distinguish natural from supernatural (or spiritual) beings in essentially the same
way religious Westerners do, interpret ape-men as non-human animals with reference to observable features
that clearly separate them from invisible spirits; from other, more familiar animals; and, of course, from people.

Some features of the ape-men might suggest a scientifically undiscovered species or population of modern apes.
But Lio statements mostly count against this hypothesis, as does all we know about the biogeography of eastern
Indonesia.

Our initial instinct, I suspect, is to regard the extant ape-men of Flores as completely imaginary.
But, taking seriously what Lio people say, I’ve found no good reason to think so. What they say about the
creatures, supplemented by other sorts of evidence, is fully consistent with a surviving hominin species,
or one that only went extinct within the last 100 years.

Paleontologists and other life scientists would do well to incorporate such Indigenous knowledge into continuing
investigations of hominin evolution in Indonesia and elsewhere. For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist
is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species.
But this does not mean that they cannot be found...'

(08-08-2023, 04:56 PM)BIAD Wrote: Is this the slow move to hinting that Bigfoot can exist in the Homo family tree?

Quote:Ancient Skull Found in China Is Unlike Any Human Seen Before

'An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin
found before. It resembles neither the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor us, suggesting
our current version of the human family tree needs another branch.

The jaw, skull, and leg bones belonging to this yet-to-be classified hominin, labeled HLD 6, were discovered in
Hualongdong, in East Asia, in 2019. In the years since, experts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have
struggled to match the remains to a known lineage.

The hominin's face is similarly structured to that of the modern human lineage, which split from Homo erectus as
far back as 750,000 years ago. But the individual's lack of chin appears more like that of a Denisovan – an extinct
species of ancient hominin in Asia that split from Neanderthals more than 400,000 years ago.

Working alongside researchers from China's Xi'an Jiaotong University, the UK's University of York, and Spain's
National Research Center on Human Evolution, researchers at CAS think they have uncovered an entirely new
lineage – a hybrid between the branch that gave us modern humans and the branch that gave us other ancient
hominins in the region, like Denisovans.


(Top) Skull of the ancient hominin from China.
(Centre) The skull and jaws of HLD 6.
(Bottom) Family tree of early humans that may have lived in Eurasia more than 50,000 years ago.

Historically, many hominin fossils from the Pleistocene that have been found in China haven't fitted easily into any
one lineage. As a result, such remains are often explained away as intermediate variations on a straight path to
modern humanity; as an archaic example of a Homo sapien, for example, or an advanced form of Homo erectus.

But this rather linear, simplistic interpretation is controversial and not widely accepted. While Homo erectus did
persist in Indonesia until roughly 100,000 years ago, the remains that were recently found in East China hold a
greater resemblance to other, more modern lineages of hominin.

Previously, genome studies on Neanderthal remains in Europe and western Asia have found evidence of a fourth
lineage of hominin living in the Middle to Late Pleistocene. But this missing group has never been officially identified
in the fossil record.

Perhaps the recent hominin remains found in China are a missing piece of the puzzle. The fossilized jaw and skull
belong to a 12- or 13-year-old, and while its face has modern-human like features, the limbs, skull cap, and jaw
"seem to reflect more primitive traits," the authors of the analysis write.


Their results complicate the path to modern humans. The mosaic of physical features found in this ancient hominin
instead supports the coexistence of three lineages in Asia – the lineage of H. erectus, the lineage of Denisovan, and
this other lineage that is "phylogenetically close" to us.

Homo sapiens only appeared in China around 120,000 years ago, but it seems as though some of our 'modern'
features existed here long before that. It may be that the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and Neanderthals
arose in southwest Asia and later spread to all continents.
That theory will now need to be confirmed with more archaeological research.

The study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution...'

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