700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative (NatGeo)

[eppur_se_muova]

Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?


By Michael Greshko

PUBLISHED May 2, 2018

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.

The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino's limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino's ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers' best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. The research—partially funded by the National Geographic Society—pushes back occupation of the Philippines to before the known origin of our species, Homo sapiens. The next-earliest evidence of Philippine hominins comes from Luzon's Callao Cave, in the form of a 67,000-year-old foot bone.

“It was surprising to find such an old peopling of the Philippines,” says lead study author Thomas Ingicco, an archaeologist with France's National Museum of Natural History. While the researchers don't know which archaic cousin of ours butchered the rhino, the find will likely cause a stir among people studying the human story in the South Pacific—especially those wondering how early hominins got to the Philippines in the first place.
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more: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/stone-tools-rhinoceros-luzon-philippines-ancient-hominins-science/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0072-8 (free abstract, full article behind paywall)

[niyad]

1. off to greatest with you

[get the red out]

2. Fascinating

Thanks for posting.

[RandomAccess]

3. Incomprehensible

[zipplewrath]

4. Could be huge

A word that is well abused these days. But we could be talking about an entire species that predated humans that evolved and then went extinct. Could be "in line" with us, or a earlier offshoot that disappeared because of physical/mental inadequacies.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. I'd guess most likely interbred.

Remember, modern humans show Neanderthal and Denisovian ancestry in their DNA. It may be that early human species adopted a "unite or die" approach when they encountered one another. The human family tree may very well have branched out earlier, and the branches reunited later. Sounds kind of incestuous, I know, but that's seems to be where the evidence is pointing. Of course, this somewhat conflicts with the biological definition of "species", so maybe we just need to stop naming all our ancestors as different species by default. The lumpers seem to be winning out over the splitters, at least where humans are concerned.

[Boomer]

6. I take issue with the term "inadequacies"

I know I'm being nitpicky, but this reference to a species that is riddled with "inadequacies" just seems slightly off to me. It's not like there's some set standard of traits that rules survival. Survival is a constantly moving target.

The very existence of any species is proof that it developed traits to survive in a particular ecological niche. Sometimes that species becomes too specialized to survive when the environment changes, or the environment changes beyond the ability of any animal in that particular niche to survive. More generalized species may survive upheavals, but may not do as well in a highly competitive environment.

Offshoots may have disappeared because they couldn't adapt to their changing environment, but we've come pretty close to that extinction too, in the past. Sometimes it's probably luck, being in the right place at the right time... or the opposite.