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Bones from Philippine cave reveal a new human cousin
Associated Press
Apr 11, 2019
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.
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 overnight 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.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/phil...rld-news/af320427-82c4-4e00-87ef-b0318f16f2d7
Figure 1 | Hominin teeth and toe bones.
Détroit et al. report the discovery of a previously unknown extinct human species named Homo luzonensis, identified from teeth and bones excavated in the Philippines and dated to at least 50,000 years old. a–c, H. luzonensis premolar and molar teeth (b) have a general pattern of a small tooth size and low tooth surface complexity that is typical of premolars and molars from the genus Homo, including the teeth of Homo sapiens (c; a roughly 177,000-year-old specimen from Israel). This pattern contrasts with the larger and more complex surfaces of premolars and molars of some early hominins that do not belong to the genus Homo, such as Australopithecus afarensis (a; a cast of an approximately 3.4-million-year-old specimen from Ethiopia). The teeth in b are from the right side of the jaw; those in a and c are from the left side but are shown mirrored as from the right side for comparison with b. d–f, A 3D scan of a toe bone from H. luzonensis (e; bottom and side views shown) is strikingly similar to that of A. afarensis (d; a 3D scan of an approximately 3.2-million-year-old specimen from Ethiopia) in overall shape and curvature, and unlike the straighter and more slender anatomy of H. sapiens toe bones (f; a 3D scan of a specimen from the Philippines from the 1800s). The interesting mix of features observed in H. luzonensis raises key questions about the species’ ancestry and its relationships with other human species. Scale bars represent 1 centimetre.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01019-7
Associated Press
Apr 11, 2019
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.
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 overnight 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.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/phil...rld-news/af320427-82c4-4e00-87ef-b0318f16f2d7
Figure 1 | Hominin teeth and toe bones.
Détroit et al. report the discovery of a previously unknown extinct human species named Homo luzonensis, identified from teeth and bones excavated in the Philippines and dated to at least 50,000 years old. a–c, H. luzonensis premolar and molar teeth (b) have a general pattern of a small tooth size and low tooth surface complexity that is typical of premolars and molars from the genus Homo, including the teeth of Homo sapiens (c; a roughly 177,000-year-old specimen from Israel). This pattern contrasts with the larger and more complex surfaces of premolars and molars of some early hominins that do not belong to the genus Homo, such as Australopithecus afarensis (a; a cast of an approximately 3.4-million-year-old specimen from Ethiopia). The teeth in b are from the right side of the jaw; those in a and c are from the left side but are shown mirrored as from the right side for comparison with b. d–f, A 3D scan of a toe bone from H. luzonensis (e; bottom and side views shown) is strikingly similar to that of A. afarensis (d; a 3D scan of an approximately 3.2-million-year-old specimen from Ethiopia) in overall shape and curvature, and unlike the straighter and more slender anatomy of H. sapiens toe bones (f; a 3D scan of a specimen from the Philippines from the 1800s). The interesting mix of features observed in H. luzonensis raises key questions about the species’ ancestry and its relationships with other human species. Scale bars represent 1 centimetre.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01019-7
