A fossilized human jawbone found in a fishing net in Taiwan’s Penghu Channel may hold clues to a previously undiscovered kind of prehistoric man.
A Taiwanese fisherman originally found the right lower jaw, estimated to be between 10,000 and 190,000 years old, and it’s been studied by
researchers for five years, LiveScience.com reported.
Researchers told LiveScience that the jaw and teeth were “unexpectedly primitive” for the time period.
“During the Pleistocene Epoch, which lasted from about 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, humans generally evolved smaller jaws and teeth, but the new fossil from Taiwan appears larger and more robust than older Homo erectus fossils from Java and northern China,” the website reported.
While it’s too early to determine if the jawbone is an indication of a type of prehistoric man that hasn’t been identified yet, researchers told LiveScience that the specimen is very much like one found in Hexian, China, which is thought to be 400,000 years old.
“We need other skeletal parts to evaluate the degree of its uniqueness," study co-author Yousuke Kaifu, a paleoanthropologist, said. "The question of species can be effectively discussed after those steps."
The jawbone suggests that “multiple lineages of extinct humans may have coexisted in Asia before the arrival of modern humans in the region about 40,000 years ago,” LiveScience wrote.
"The new Taiwan mandible is clearly different than the known Homo erectus populations from northern China and Java, and likely represents a group that has been
unrecognized so far," Kaifu told CNN. "It's only one piece, but the significance is huge. "The findings reminded me that our knowledge is always very limited, and we have very limited fossil records. That's a great lesson for me."
"This is a very different, complex, and exciting story compared to what I was taught in school," Kaifu told LiveScience.
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