Humans of the modern type have never coexisted with an erect person - such a sensational conclusion was made by an international group of scientists led by Etty Indriati from Gadzha Mada University (Indonesia) and Susan Anton from New York University (USA) following excavations on the banks of the Solo River on the island of Java
Researchers have proposed a new view of human evolution and assigned a different role to Homo erectus in it.
Homo erectus is considered our direct ancestor, he really resembles Homo sapiens in many ways, except for the size of the brain and the shape of the skull. He was the first of our ancestors to leave Africa - about 1.8 million years ago. In Africa and most of Asia, Homo erectus became extinct about 500 thousand years ago, but it seems to have existed in Indonesia 35-50 thousand years ago, as indicated by the remains found in the village of Ngandong near the Solo River. The first representatives of our species, who came to Indonesia about 40 thousand years ago, could meet with their distant relatives.
The question of the simultaneous existence of two species is important for models of the origin of modern humans. One hypothesis - human African descent - predicts such overlaps. The other - the multi-regional model - does not (it claims that modern humans emerged as a result of the genetic contribution of hominid populations throughout the Old World). The existence of Homo erectus in Indonesia is considered one of the arguments in favor of the first model.
However, excavations have shown that the time of Homo erectus in this region ended before humans of the modern type got there. According to the analysis, Homo erectus disappeared at least 143 thousand years ago, but it is more likely that this happened more than 550 thousand years ago, long before the appearance of Homo sapiens.
Excavations took place in two places on the 20-meter river terrace - in Ngandong and Jigar. The deposits of the terrace were formed by the sediments of an ancient river, the channel of which has greatly deepened since then. The first finds were made in the 1930s.
More recently, in 1996, a group of researchers found in this area the remains of hominids, whose age was estimated at 35-50 thousand years. Dating was carried out on the teeth of animals mixed with human bones, so many specialists doubted it: the fossils lying nearby could really belong to different eras.
In 2004, members of that group and its critics began to jointly verify the data obtained. No evidence of mixing was found: the fossil was deposited for a short period of time.
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The new dating, however, gave completely different results than those voiced above. The teeth were dated using the U-method and electron spin resonance analysis, and the argon-argon method was applied to volcanic materials in the sediments. Hence such a spread of indicators.
The research results are published in the journal PLoS ONE.