Historical story

Special human remains in Chinese cave

It turns out to be 'only' 14,500 to 11,500 years old, the strange human skull that was found in 1979 by a Chinese geologist in a cave in Longlin, in southern China. An international team of archaeologists recently analyzed the skull extensively using modern techniques. The skull now appears to have all kinds of special properties that point to a still unknown chapter in human evolution.

The archaeologists describe their discovery in the freely accessible online scientific journal PLoS ONE. Human remains that probably belong to the same population have been found in the nearby Maludong ("red deer") cave.

The fossils have features typical of modern hominids such as those that roamed Europe during the last ice age, as well as features reminiscent of very early hominids that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

There are more known examples of hominids combining modern and very ancient outer human traits, but these were all found in Africa. Moreover, these remains are all many times older than the fossils found in the Chinese caves.

It is therefore quite extraordinary that so relatively recently, hominids of a species that at first sight were completely different from what we would expect roamed around in China. For lack of a better description, archaeologists are tentatively calling their discovery the "red deer cave man," as evidence has been found that this human species hunted the now-extinct red giant deer and prepared them over a fire in the cave.

Old kind rather than new kind

Australian research leader Darren Curnoe does not rule out the possibility that this could indeed be a hitherto unknown, isolated archaic human species that lived in this area until the end of the last ice age. But because the fossils have such strange and divergent characteristics among themselves, archaeologists are still hesitant to actually classify the discovery as a new species.

Another explanation is more obvious, the archaeologists write in their article. It is probably a group of indeed modern Homo sapiens which formed a very early migration wave from Africa and for some reason has left no genetic traces in modern Asian man.

At the moment, researchers are trying to isolate DNA from the remains. By examining DNA, it will become much clearer about the origin of these mysterious fossils and whether their former owners, for example, engaged in sexual relations with other hominids.

Since no human fossils younger than 100,000 years old and from species other than ourselves have been found in the entire eastern half of the Asian mainland so far, scientists thought that modern humans had no competition from other human species in this area. However, the discovery of the 'red deer-man' shows that this may not have been the case.

At present, almost half the world's population consists of Asians. Homo sapiens, our distant ancestors first moved to the area about 70,000 years ago. But how they fared and how they have further evolved, we know very little about that. The soil in China and the rest of East Asia undoubtedly has many more secrets to reveal…