Bones from Philippine cave reveal a new human cousin

[weimy froob]

NEW YORK — Fossil bones and teeth found in the Philippines have revealed a long-lost cousin of modern people, which evidently lived around the time our own species was spreading from Africa to occupy the rest of the world.

It's yet another reminder that, although Homo sapiens is now the only surviving member of our branch of the evolutionary tree, we've had company for most of our existence.

And it makes our understanding of human evolution in Asia "messier, more complicated and whole lot more interesting," says one expert, Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature, scientists describe a cache of seven teeth and six bones from the feet, hands and thigh of at least three individuals. They were recovered from Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines in 2007, 2011 and 2015. Tests on two samples show minimum ages of 50,000 years and 67,000 years.

The main exodus of our own species from Africa that all of today's non-African people are descended from took place around 60,000 years ago.

Analysis of the bones from Luzon led the study authors to conclude they belonged to a previously unknown member of our "Homo" branch of the family tree. One of the toe bones and the overall pattern of tooth shapes and sizes differ from what's been seen before in the Homo family, the researchers said.

They dubbed the creature Homo luzonensis.

It apparently used stone tools and its small teeth suggest it might have been rather small-bodied, said one of the study authors, Florent Detroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

H. luzonensis lived in eastern Asia at around the same time as not only our species but other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the diminutive "hobbits" of the island of Flores in Indonesia.

There's no sign that H. luzonensis encountered any other member of the Homo group, Detroit said in an email. Our species isn't known to have reached the Philippines until thousands of years after the age of the bones, he said.

But some human relative was on Luzon more than 700,000 years ago, as indicated by the presence of stone tools and a butchered rhino dating to that time, he said. It might have been the newfound species or an ancestor of it, he said in an email.

Detroit said it's not clear how H. luzonensis is related to other species of Homo. He speculated that it might have descended from an earlier human relative, Homo erectus, that somehow crossed the sea to Luzon.

H. erectus is generally considered the first Homo species to have expanded beyond Africa, and it plays a prominent role in the conventional wisdom about evolution outside that continent. Some scientists have suggested that the hobbits on the Indonesian island are descended from H. erectus.

Tocheri, who did not participate it the new report, agreed that both H. luzonensis and the hobbits may have descended from H. erectus. But he said the Philippines discovery gives new credence to an alternate view: Maybe some unknown creature other than H. erectus also slipped out of Africa and into Europe and Asia, and later gave rise to both island species.

After all, he said in an interview, remains of the hobbits and H. luzonensis show a mix of primitive and more modern traits that differ from what's seen in H. erectus. They look more like what one what might find in Africa 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago, and which might have been carried out of that continent by the mystery species, he said.

The discovery of a new human relative on Luzon might be "smoke from a much, much bigger fire," he said.

Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said the Luzon find "shows we still know very little about human evolution, particularly in Asia."

More such discoveries will probably emerge with further work in the region, which is under-studied, he said in an email.

[salamander]

Nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Indonesia and the Philippines housed a number of different variations of homo species.

[weimy froob]

Nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Indonesia and the Philippines housed a number of different variations of homo species.

it is all very interesting.



The discovery of a new human relative on Luzon might be "smoke from a much, much bigger fire," he said.

[weimy froob]

Was it jepps?

thanks for the contribution. 9 posts and counting today.

[Badbeat]

My wife has some cute cousins who live in the philippines

[vikesbumeout]

Was it jepps?

Obvi

[Badbeat]

My wife has some cute cousins who live in the philippines

Are they jepps?

There was a time long ago when i met jepps...

They are not jepps or jepps like in any fashion

[weimy froob]

another bone found.

Spectacular' jawbone discovery sheds light on ancient Denisovans
Scientists extract proteins from a molar to uncover details of mysterious species’ origins

A human jawbone found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau has revealed new details about the appearance and lifestyle of a mysterious ancient species called Denisovans.

The 160,000-year-old fossil, comprising a powerful jaw and unusually large teeth, suggests these early relatives would have looked something like the most primitive of the Neanderthals. The discovery also shows that Denisovans lived at extremely high altitude and, through interbreeding, may have passed on gene adaptations for this lifestyle to modern-day Sherpas in the region.

Jean-Jacques Hublin, the director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and senior author of the find, described this element as “spectacular”. He said: “Until today, nobody imagined that archaic humans could be able to dwell in such an environment.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... betan-cave

[weimy froob]

I looked this up last night and it got me thinking. Modern humans began to show up between around 200,000 years ago. Our history only goes back a few thousand years. The oldest of our proven historical record only goes back to 10-15,000 years ago and most of it is oral traditions pass down through the ages versus actual record.

So why is it so crazy to think there may have been sophisticated highly evolve cultures in human history that we know nothing about. It's almost an agreed upon fact that there was a flood or multiple floods that wiped out vast areas of the planet. We wouldn't necessarily find any trace of their civilizations as there may be nothing left. Aliens made me write this. There are many outliers in the fossil record that can't be explained with our current view of history, and they have found problems with the DNA record of many cultures placing middle easterners in New Zealand or Europeans in the Americas long before they should have been.

is there a question somewhere in there? asking for a friend.

sapiens migrated out of east africa 70,000 years ago. we're the most successful invasive species ever-so watch out. so why are so many people still unhappy? i guess that last question could have went into the deep thoughts forum.

[weimy froob]

I looked this up last night and it got me thinking. Modern humans began to show up between around 200,000 years ago. Our history only goes back a few thousand years. The oldest of our proven historical record only goes back to 10-15,000 years ago and most of it is oral traditions pass down through the ages versus actual record.

So why is it so crazy to think there may have been sophisticated highly evolve cultures in human history that we know nothing about. It's almost an agreed upon fact that there was a flood or multiple floods that wiped out vast areas of the planet. We wouldn't necessarily find any trace of their civilizations as there may be nothing left. Aliens made me write this. There are many outliers in the fossil record that can't be explained with our current view of history, and they have found problems with the DNA record of many cultures placing middle easterners in New Zealand or Europeans in the Americas long before they should have been.

is there a question somewhere in there? asking for a friend.

sapiens migrated out of east africa 70,000 years ago. we're the most successful invasive species ever-so watch out. so why are so many people still unhappy? i guess that last question could have went into the deep thoughts forum.

The sites I looked at differinciated it with anatomically human and behaviorally human. Stating that even after we were biologically what we are, behaviorally our minds had a long way to go from being animals to humans. That all makes some sense to me I guess. Still, they had us as anatomically "us" from 200,000 - 50,000 bc, one said 300,000... and then we shifted behaviorally to what we are. I call bullshit. No doubt it took time to develop those things about ourselves that we don't even question. Language, sexuality, culture in general, but even if it didn't look and work exactly the way it does doesn't mean it didn't exist. I think there was a lot more. I won't go as far as to say as advanced as we currently are, but why not global seafarers? What about that sort of culture would last tens of thousands of years? What about ours would? Mt Rushmore and similar monuments? Maybe?

remember this is sciencechat-there is a deep thoughts forum too. we require some evidence here before we can go forward with hypothesis.

[weimy froob]

The sites I looked at differinciated it with anatomically human and behaviorally human. Stating that even after we were biologically what we are, behaviorally our minds had a long way to go from being animals to humans. That all makes some sense to me I guess. Still, they had us as anatomically "us" from 200,000 - 50,000 bc, one said 300,000... and then we shifted behaviorally to what we are. I call bullshit. No doubt it took time to develop those things about ourselves that we don't even question. Language, sexuality, culture in general, but even if it didn't look and work exactly the way it does doesn't mean it didn't exist. I think there was a lot more. I won't go as far as to say as advanced as we currently are, but why not global seafarers? What about that sort of culture would last tens of thousands of years? What about ours would? Mt Rushmore and similar monuments? Maybe?

remember this is sciencechat-there is a deep thoughts forum too. we require some evidence here before we can go forward with hypothesis.

I said so. There's your Fuck'n evidence.

just messing with you. let's have more theory from you. if nothing else it's a spark for sciencechat that might light a fire.

[weimy froob]

I said so. There's your Fuck'n evidence.

just messing with you. let's have more theory from you. if nothing else it's a spark for sciencechat that might light a fire.

Nope, I'm scorn now. It's just not the same.

you never know-that might be all it take to start a wildfire. sciencechat forever!

[weimy froob]

Neanderthal Greek Paradise Found
Anthropologists find a beautiful Greek waterfront paradise once inhabited by generations of Neanderthals.

https://www.seeker.com/neanderthal-gree ... 53876.html

[weimy froob]

Declining fertility rates may explain Neanderthal extinction
Population modelling shows population could have dwindled to extinction due to demographics, not catastrophe
Date:
May 29, 2019
Source:
PLOS
Summary:
A new hypothesis for Neanderthal extinction supported by population modeling has been put forward

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 145057.htm

[weimy froob]

A Skull Bone Discovered in Greece May Alter the Story of Human Prehistory

The bone, found in a cave, is the oldest modern human fossil ever discovered in Europe. It hints that humans began leaving Africa far earlier than once thought.

By Carl Zimmer
July 10, 2019

A skull fragment found in the roof of a cave in southern Greece is the oldest fossil of Homo sapiens ever discovered in Europe, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Until now, the earliest remains of modern humans found on the Continent were less than 45,000 years old. The skull bone is more than four times as old, dating back over 210,000 years, researchers reported in the journal Nature.

The finding is likely to reshape the story of how humans spread into Europe, and may revise theories about the history of our species.

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. The new fossil bolsters an emerging view that our species migrated from Africa in several waves, beginning early in our history.

But the first waves of migrants vanished. All humans who have ancestry outside of Africa today descended from a later migration, about 70,000 years ago.

Katerina Harvati, lead author of the new study, said it’s impossible to say how long the earliest Europeans endured on the Continent, or why they disappeared.

“It’s a very good question, and I have no idea,” said Dr. Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “I mean, this is the first time that we’ve found them.”

The skull first came to light in 1978, as anthropologists from the University of Athens School of Medicine explored a cave called Apidima, on the Peloponnese. They found fragments from a pair of skulls lodged in the roof of the cave.

The researchers freed a backpack-size rock containing the fossils, and then struggled for years to extract the bones.

One of the fossils, called Apidima 1, turned out to be part of the back of a skull. The other, Apidima 2, consisted of 66 fragments from an individual’s face.

An early study of Apidima 2 suggested the fragments were about 160,000 years old, and so it seemed likely that Apidima 1 had fossilized around the same time.

That age made the two fossils much older than the earliest known evidence of our species in Europe. It seemed more likely that the skulls belonged to Neanderthals, who arrived in Europe about 400,000 years ago.

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of Athens invited Dr. Harvati, an expert on the shapes of human skull fossils, to take a closer look. She and her colleagues performed CT scans on the remains and then analyzed them on a computer.

When the researchers virtually reassembled the face of Apidima 2, they realized they were looking at a Neanderthal. But when the team analyzed the back of Apidima 1’s skull, they knew that they were dealing with something different.

In Neanderthals and other extinct human relatives, the back of the skull bulges outward. “It looks like when you put your hair up in a bun,” Dr. Harvati said.

But in our own species, there is no bulge. Compared with our extinct cousins, the back of the modern human skull is distinctively round.

To Dr. Harvati’s surprise, so was the back of Apidima 1’s skull. It also had other features found in Homo sapiens but not in other species.

Laura Buck, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, said Dr. Harvati and her colleagues made a compelling case. “That very round shape is something we tend not to see in other groups,” Dr. Buck said.

While Dr. Harvati and her colleagues were analyzing the fossils, Rainer Grün carried out a new study of their age. Dr. Grün, a geochronologist at Griffith University in Australia, analyzed tiny samples of rock retrieved from the two fossils.

Apidima 2, the Neanderthal, turned out to be 170,000 years old, just a bit older than the previous estimate. But Apidima 1, the Homo sapiens skull, was at least 210,000 years old — some 40,000 years older than Apidima 2.

That date makes the skull fragment the oldest modern human fossil not just in Europe, but anywhere outside Africa. The challenge scientists now face is to figure out how Apidima 1 fits into our ancient history.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have amassed a great deal of evidence indicating that human populations that live outside Africa today all descended from small groups of migrants who departed the continent some 70,000 years ago.

The journey is recorded in human DNA, and archaeologists have documented it by tracking the spread of human remains and tools from Africa.

But in recent years, researchers have discovered a few fossils that don’t fit the narrative. Last year, for example, researchers found a Homo sapiens jaw in Israel that is 180,000 years old.

Another clue came to light in 2017, in bits of DNA preserved in Neanderthal fossils discovered in Europe. Some of the genetic material appeared to have been inherited from Homo sapiens, not Neanderthals. The scientists speculated that our species reached Europe at least 270,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals there.

Dr. Harvati said that Apidima 1 and the DNA evidence both point to an early expansion of Homo sapiens into Europe from Africa. “It’s eerie how well it all fits,” she said.

It’s possible that the fossils in Israel belong to the same wave of modern humans from Africa, or perhaps to a later one. In either case, it seems that all those people disappeared.

One speculation is that Neanderthals moved into Greece and Israel, and outcompeted the modern humans they encountered. If so, things went differently during the later migration 70,000 years ago.

That wave of humans may have thrived outside Africa because they brought better tools. “If there’s an overarching explanation, my guess would be a cultural process,” Dr. Harvati said.

Greece may be a good place to test this idea. Southeast Europe may have served as a corridor for various kinds of humans moving into Europe, as well as a refuge when ice age glaciers covered the rest of the Continent.

“This is a hypothesis that should be tested with data on the ground,” Dr. Harvati said. “And this is a really interesting place to be looking at.”

[Tommy_Hawk]

Theorists suggest ancient advanced civilizations existed and were wiped out. We are the remnants of these civilizations, started with perhaps only a few thousand homosapiens to repopulate the earth. The different human-like species cited here would suggest evolution alone is not the reason people now exist in many different body types.

These theorists point to Göbekli Tepe, and of course Egypt as the proof. Egypt, (i.e the Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Sphinx) as we know it today are thought to be much older and altered from their original states, which date thousands of years than previously thought.

The amount of new discoveries are slowly eroding the ego of mainstream scientists, and forcing them to rewrite the history of the human race.

Thanks for the data, Weimy.


ruff ruff

[salamander]

Nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Indonesia and the Philippines housed a number of different variations of homo species.

it is all very interesting.



The discovery of a new human relative on Luzon might be "smoke from a much, much bigger fire," he said.

That statement right there, if found to be true, would be a massive find.

[salamander]

My wife has some cute cousins who live in the philippines

My brother is engaged to a Philippine lady.

[salamander]

I looked this up last night and it got me thinking. Modern humans began to show up between around 200,000 years ago. Our history only goes back a few thousand years. The oldest of our proven historical record only goes back to 10-15,000 years ago and most of it is oral traditions pass down through the ages versus actual record.

So why is it so crazy to think there may have been sophisticated highly evolve cultures in human history that we know nothing about. It's almost an agreed upon fact that there was a flood or multiple floods that wiped out vast areas of the planet. We wouldn't necessarily find any trace of their civilizations as there may be nothing left. Aliens made me write this. There are many outliers in the fossil record that can't be explained with our current view of history, and they have found problems with the DNA record of many cultures placing middle easterners in New Zealand or Europeans in the Americas long before they should have been.

Oh yeah, the unwritten portion of human history very mysterious. There is a very big link we're missing.

[Badbeat]

My wife has some cute cousins who live in the philippines

My brother is engaged to a Philippine lady.

I hope he gets as lucky as I did

[salamander]

My wife has some cute cousins who live in the philippines

My brother is engaged to a Philippine lady.

I hope he gets as lucky as I did

He's in love with her for sure.

[salamander]

I looked this up last night and it got me thinking. Modern humans began to show up between around 200,000 years ago. Our history only goes back a few thousand years. The oldest of our proven historical record only goes back to 10-15,000 years ago and most of it is oral traditions pass down through the ages versus actual record.

So why is it so crazy to think there may have been sophisticated highly evolve cultures in human history that we know nothing about. It's almost an agreed upon fact that there was a flood or multiple floods that wiped out vast areas of the planet. We wouldn't necessarily find any trace of their civilizations as there may be nothing left. Aliens made me write this. There are many outliers in the fossil record that can't be explained with our current view of history, and they have found problems with the DNA record of many cultures placing middle easterners in New Zealand or Europeans in the Americas long before they should have been.

is there a question somewhere in there? asking for a friend.

sapiens migrated out of east africa 70,000 years ago. we're the most successful invasive species ever-so watch out. so why are so many people still unhappy? i guess that last question could have went into the deep thoughts forum.

The sites I looked at differinciated it with anatomically human and behaviorally human. Stating that even after we were biologically what we are, behaviorally our minds had a long way to go from being animals to humans. That all makes some sense to me I guess. Still, they had us as anatomically "us" from 200,000 - 50,000 bc, one said 300,000... and then we shifted behaviorally to what we are. I call bullshit. No doubt it took time to develop those things about ourselves that we don't even question. Language, sexuality, culture in general, but even if it didn't look and work exactly the way it does doesn't mean it didn't exist. I think there was a lot more. I won't go as far as to say as advanced as we currently are, but why not global seafarers? What about that sort of culture would last tens of thousands of years? What about ours would? Mt Rushmore and similar monuments? Maybe?

Then there's this little gem from 2010:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/scie ... rcheo.html

There's evidence that we could've been sea faring 100,000 - 130,000 years ago.
We know for a fact sea migration happened to Australia 60,000 years ago.
In the article there's this little paragraph that suggests sea travel existed prior to our species existence:

Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

This would suggest we were developing mentally to the point where we could travel small seas far earlier than we ever thought.
Possibly pre-homosapian.

[salamander]

Neanderthal Greek Paradise Found
Anthropologists find a beautiful Greek waterfront paradise once inhabited by generations of Neanderthals.

https://www.seeker.com/neanderthal-gree ... 53876.html

This is also fascinating. Especially this:

The Neanderthals chose a scenic place to live...

That they would choose a place out of beauty instead of efficiency is kind of cool.

[weimy froob]

this might as well be the evolution of man thread.

Oldest ever human genetic evidence clarifies dispute over our ancestors
Date:
April 1, 2020
Source:
University of Copenhagen The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
Summary:
Genetic information from an 800,000-year-old human fossil has been retrieved for the first time. The results shed light on one of the branching points in the human family tree, reaching much further back in time than previously possible.

Reconstructing the human family tree

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 111657.htm

[weimy froob]

When three species of human ancestor walked the Earth
Date:
April 2, 2020
Source:
Arizona State University
Summary:
Scientists share details of the most ancient fossil of Homo erectus known and discuss how these new findings are forcing us to rewrite a part of our species' evolutionary history.

An international team, including Arizona State University researcher Gary Schwartz, have unearthed the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in their anatomy and aspects of their behavior.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 155736.htm

[weimy froob]

this might as well be the evolution of man thread.

A tooth offers evidence modern humans reached Europe earlier than previously thought
Tom Metcalfe
NBC NewsMay 11, 2020, 10:00 AM CDT

A single tooth is changing how archaeologists think about the history of human evolution.

The tooth, a molar, is one of the last remnants of the earliest modern humans found in Europe, according to two papers published Monday by an international team of archaeologists, who found it among human remains, stone and bone tools, and pendants made from cave bear teeth, in Bulgaria’s labyrinthine Bacho Kiro cave.

“This is much older than anything else that we have found so far from modern humans in Europe,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig in Germany, who led the team.

The molar is the largest surviving bone fragment from a group of very early Homo sapiens that was dated to between 44,000 and 46,000 years ago.



This molar tooth from the Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, dated to between 44,000 and 46,000 years ago, is one of the oldest pieces of evidence of Homo sapiens found in Europe.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tooth-offers ... 07829.html