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Thigh bone points to unexpectedly long survival of ancient human ancestors
The Guardian ^ | Thursday 17 December 2015 | Tim Radford

Posted on 12/17/2015 3:58:49 PM PST by MinorityRepublican

A 14,000-year-old fragment of thigh bone found in a cave in China may represent evidence of the unexpected survival of long-vanished human ancestors.

If so, then right into and through the ice age, a creature that was either Homo habilis or Homo erectus survived alongside the Neanderthals, the unknown humans who left behind some DNA in a cave in Siberia, the mysterious so-called hobbit of the island of Flores in Indonesia, and modern Homo sapiens.

But by the end of this multicultural ice age 10,000 years ago, only one human species survived.

The fossil, a partial femur, had survived unstudied for at least 25 years in a museum in southeastern Yunnan in China. It was one of a set of fossilised remains found in the Maludong Cave – it means Red Deer Cave – in 1989. Darren Curnoe, a palaeoanthropologist from the University of New South Wales, and Ji Xueping from the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, report in the PLOS One that in their estimation, the bone fragment matched those from species such as Homo habilis or Homo erectus, who first stalked the planet more than 1.5 million years ago.

Its young age suggests the possibility that primitive-looking humans could have survived until very late in our evolution, but we need to be careful as it is just one bone, said Ji.

(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...


TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: china; denisovans; flores; godgravesglyphs; godsgravesglyphs; hobbit; homoerectus; homofloresiensis; homohabilis; homosapiens; neandertal; neandertals; neanderthal; neanderthals

1 posted on 12/17/2015 3:58:49 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
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To: MinorityRepublican

Big Foot is out there....


2 posted on 12/17/2015 4:00:57 PM PST by Paladin2 (my non-desktop devices are no longer allowed to try to fix speling and punctuation, nor my gran-mah.)
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To: MinorityRepublican
It's a Pak breeder.
3 posted on 12/17/2015 4:07:43 PM PST by Toddsterpatriot ("Telling the government to lower trade barriers to zero...is government interference" central_va)
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To: StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; decimon; 1010RD; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; ...
Thanks MinorityRepublican.

4 posted on 12/18/2015 4:23:30 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Here's to the day the forensics people scrape what's left of Putin off the ceiling of his limo.)
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To: SunkenCiv; MinorityRepublican; blam; BenLurkin; All

Another interesting puzzle is the Kow Marsh remains found in Australia. These people appear to be pre sapien, but the are not all that old. Two dates mentioned ar 11,000 and 14,000 years old. See two links below: the first showing skulls, and the second listing a number of interesting articles on this find. I hope they will be able to do DNA studies to determine whether modern native Australians have some of these creatures DNA. We are of course now learning the modern humans have 1% to 4% Neanderthal DNA.

https://www.google.com/search?q=kow+swamp+australia+fossils&num=50&newwindow=1&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvh7mEzufJAhXJeCYKHWFKB9cQsAQIKw&biw=1600&bih=799

https://www.google.com/search?num=50&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=kow+swamp+australia+fossils&oq=kow+swamp+australia+fossils&gs_l=serp.12...24557.35541.0.38890.18.18.0.0.0.0.134.2030.0j18.18.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..9.9.1052.skUbVmPJnsY


5 posted on 12/19/2015 1:33:27 AM PST by gleeaikin
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