Recently, a skeleton of a rhinoceros was discovered on one of the islands of the Philippines with clear traces of the impact of primitive tools. Did human ancestors cross the ocean as much as 700,000 years ago? Trying to figure it out.
A research team recently discovered a rhino skeleton in Kalinga, the Philippine province of Luzon. An article published in Nature notes the fact that the skeleton has clearly visible traces of carcass processing with stone tools. It would seem that it is quite an ordinary discovery, if not for one "but": the age of the skeleton is about 700,000 years! According to the anthropological concept, in this historical period in this region, the ancestors of modern people had no idea how to make tools from scrap materials.
Who did this?
Now only one thing is clear - the hunters did not belong to Homo sapiens. In addition to our direct ancestors, the hominid family also includes Neanderthals and Denisovans, but the roots of human evolution go much deeper. The most likely candidate for hunters is Homo erectus, which disappeared about 140,000 years ago. The nature of the tools used to process the mascara partly supports this theory.
The authors currently acknowledge one major flaw in their hypothesis. The Philippines is an isolated chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, which in the days of Homo erectus could only be reached after a long and dangerous journey in a reliable boat. According to the article, the suggestion that a human ancestor could have made such a journey seems "highly contrived" even by the scientist himself. But, nevertheless, rhino bones are irrefutable evidence of the impossible.
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Was it really a man's doing?
Anyone could have marked the bones, right? So why did the researchers think it was humans who killed the rhino? First, they managed to reconstruct the tools with which the hunters processed the carcass. These are stone scrapers well known to scientists, fragments of which were found during excavations and which correspond to small scratches left on the bones after the meat and skin were scraped off from them. For carnivores, the scratches are too deep, and the special shape of the notches suggests that this is the result of the activity of a creature holding a primitive tool in its hands. The lead author of the study, Thomas Ingicco, notes that environmental impacts have been found on the rhino remains, which are very different in nature from those left by human ancestors. The most striking example is marksremaining from a blow with a stone edge - there are simply no animals in nature that could leave such a mark.
What other scientists think
The scientific community is excited about the new discovery. Briana Pobiner, a research scientist at the Smithsonian University who studies the diet of early humans, describes the find as "an exciting discovery supported by well-known evidence of overt human activity." According to Briana, it also serves as evidence that, by some miracle, at least one species of hominids was still able to travel by sea in the middle Pleistocene. By the way, hominids started hunting rhinos about 2,000,000 years ago!
Conclusion
The migration of human ancestors has always been the subject of heated scientific debate, but, apparently, Homo erectus did in fact inhabit the eastern lands much earlier than other species. The first evidence of the appearance of Homo sapiens in these regions goes back about 300,000 years, so there is indeed a huge historical gap between them. The brain of Homo erectus was much smaller than that of Homo sapiens, which did not prevent them from crossing the ocean and quite successfully hunting large, dangerous animals. The new discovery once again demonstrates how little modern man actually knows about the realities of bygone eras - who knows, maybe in the future archaeologists and paleontologists will be able to uncover other mysteries of the past that now seem incredible to us?
Vasily Makarov