An unusual bone recently recovered from a site in southwestern China seems to confirm that the Red Deer Cave people, a mysterious group of human-like primates first discovered in 2012, were actually pre-modern humans not unlike the Neanderthals.
In an article published earlier this week, Darren Curnoe, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia and one of the researchers that initially reported on the discovery of the Red Deer Cave people, revealed that the team found and studied a femur belonging to the group at a site near northern Vietnam.
Like the cranial bones, jaw bones, and teeth originally used to identify the Red Deer Cave people three years ago, the leg bone was dated to be approximately 14,000 years old. However, it paints a more complete picture of what at least some of these people’s bones might have looked like, he added, and closely resembles the thigh bones early Homo erectus and Homo habilis.
For example, the femur is small like those of pre-modern humans, Curnoe said. It has a narrow shaft and a thin outer layer (cortex). The walls of this shaft are reinforced in areas of high strain, he added. The femur has a long neck, and the area where the hip’s primary flexor muscle (lesser trochanter) attaches is said to be quite large and backwards-facing.
Pictured is an image of the Red Deer Cave. (Credit: Ji Xueping & Darren Curnoe)
If they were an ancient species, how did they survive so long?
The research team previously reported that the Red Deer Cave people were anatomically unique amongst modern humans, and they represented either an extremely early human population that lived in isolation, or an archaic species similar to the Neanderthals that survived in isolation. Other colleagues suggested they may have been a hybrid of the two, Curnoe said.
In a paper published Thursday in the journal PLOS One, he and his colleagues reported that the newly discovered femur had “affinities to archaic hominins,” particularly those living during the Lower Pleistocene. While they were unable to match the bone to any specific species, they noted that it was “probably” from “an archaic population that survived until around 14,000 years ago in the biogeographically complex region of Southwest China.”
Curnoe admitted that other experts may have difficulty accepting that species this ancient could be so young and that his team’s work is “controversial.” However, he added that the thigh bone “might… represent a relic, tropically adapted, archaic population that survived relatively late in this biogeographically complex, highly diverse and largely isolated region.”
Despite their progress, the researchers note that they still have much to learn about the Red Deer Cave people, such as why they were able to survive as long as they did and why they can only be found in the tropical climates of southwestern China. Curnoe said that he hopes he and his fellow researchers are able to solve those mysteries in the near future.
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Feature Image: Artist’s reconstruction of a Red Deer Cave man. (Credit: Peter Schouten)
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