The remains of a possibly previously unknown human species that lived in the territory of modern China about 15-14 thousand years ago, scientists discovered in the territory of the Red Deer caves, follows from an article in PLoS One.
“These fossils may have belonged to an unknown hominid species who survived until the very end of the Ice Age. On the other hand, he may be a descendant of early waves of "colonists" from Africa, who were anatomically different from modern humans and did not contribute to the genome of mankind, "explained the head of the research group Darren Carnot from the University of New South Wales in Kensington (Australia) …
An approximate reconstruction of the appearance of a new person
Karnot and his colleagues have studied several unusual skeletons of ancient people found in China over the past 30 years. Three of them were discovered by Chinese scientists in 1989 in the Red Deer Cave near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan province. The fourth was found back in 1979 in the vicinity of the Longlin village in the Guangxi Autonomous Region, but it was recovered from the surrounding rocks only in 2008, RIA Novosti reports.
The authors of the study became interested in these remains, drawing attention to the unusual shape of the skulls in the sets of fossils from the cave and the village of Longlin. According to the researchers, they are made up of elements, some of which coincide in shape with similar bones of modern people, and the other with the features of the skull of more ancient representatives of the genus Homo.
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Paleontologists have calculated the age of the bones of mysterious people by comparing the number of atoms of "heavy" carbon-13 and ordinary carbon-12. According to their calculations, the owners of these skulls lived on the territory of southeastern China approximately 14.5-11.5 thousand years ago.
Researchers called them "people from the cave of the Red Deer", as scientists found many bones of a red deer, which became extinct in China several millennia ago, next to the remains of ancient protomen.
As scientists note, this is an amazing result - most of the "dead-end" branches of the development of the genus Homo died out 50-75 thousand years before the appearance of the first modern humans in Asia. It is quite possible that people from the Red Deer Cave were neighbors of the first farmers in the territory of the future Celestial Empire.
Carnot and his colleagues prefer not to take risks and do not declare their "wards" a new kind of people. Nevertheless, there are reasons for this - over the past decade, paleontologists have discovered two new species from the genus Homo in Asia. In particular, in 2003, the remains of "hobbits" were found on the Indonesian island of Flores, and in 2010, fragments of bones of the "Denisovites" were found in the Russian Denisova cave.
