Did scientists unearth another ancient human lineage in China?

Scientists in China could have discovered a completely new lineage of ancient people after learning fragments of the mandible, cranium and leg bones of a fossilised hominid that dates again to at the least 300,000 years in the past. Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Scientists in China could have discovered a completely new lineage of ancient people after learning fragments of the mandible, cranium and leg bones of a fossilised hominid that dates again at the least 300,000 years. 

A gaggle of palaeontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong University, University of York, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Research Center on Human Evolution famous in their analysis revealed in the Journal of Human Evolution that the fossils have been excavated from a web site in Hualongdong, a area in East China. 

The area has revealed an abundance of hominin fossils that dates again to an analogous time interval. The fossil (mandible and partial skull) discovered by the palaeontologists has been labelled HLD 6, the examine famous. 

After performing hassle morphological and geometric evaluation, scientists discovered sure distinctive traits in the jawbone reminiscent of a triangular decrease edge and a singular bend. 

Both these options are additionally discovered in trendy people and different species of hominins such because the Neanderthals and Denisovan in the course of the late Middle Pleistocene epoch.

The jawbone’s distinctive options exhibited similarities to each trendy people and hominids of the late Middle Pleistocene interval. Notably, it lacked a chin, suggesting a better connection to older species. Additional traits harking back to the Middle Pleistocene hominins led the scientists to conclude that the fossil resembles a specimen of the Homo erectus.

This mosaic of traits from completely different human lineages has led scientists to consider that the specimen possessed a mixture of traits from each ancient hominids and trendy people. 

This was confirmed additional when the scientists examined the cranium and located that the facial bones shared larger similarities with these of recent people as in comparison with the jawbone. 

As scientists progressed additional with their examine, they dominated out the potential of the fossil belonging to the Denisovan lineage. This conclusion means that the fossil is probably a part of another lineage which is distinctively completely different from Denisovans and the Homo erectus, but nearer to Homo sapiens. 

The examine thus implies that this specific species most likely shared shut evolutionary relationships with hominin from the Middle to Late Pleistocene which resulted in shared traits.