First of all, it was just the tiny bones of a toe, the excavation team of 2007, found in a cave on the Philippine island of Luzon. Meanwhile, the specialists from the at least 67 000 years old the layers of the soil have twelve teeth, fingers, foot, and thigh bone recovered. According to the exact study of the Remains, the Team of Florent Détroit from the Paris Museum of natural history is now certain: they belong to a previously unknown human species. Homo luzonensis, one of the researchers according to the site named, had has a skeleton that is similar to the part in front of more than two million years ago, but also the characteristic features of modern people, write to Detroit and colleagues in the journal “Nature”.
Re-an island-dwelling species of human
“to Me, this article is a little reminiscent of the first description of Homo floresiensis,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max-Planck-Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. This is because of their small stature, extraordinary human species had discovered researchers in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores. The bones of the Flores people have characteristics that fit to none of the well-known people lines.
The Islands of Luzon and Flores have a similar geological history. As the sea level was during the ice ages several times by up to 120 meters lower than it is today, created land bridges, the present-day mainland Southeast Asia, the Andes with some of the Indonesian Islands, so the early people and were able to hike. Luzon and Flores, however, were never connected with the mainland or other Islands. Early people could have reached the Islands on rafts, are likely to be have remained fairly isolated from the Rest of the world.
Islands as an evolutionary accelerator
So might have to adapt to the local living conditions, a mixture of characteristics that distinguish it clearly from other people. “On such isolated Islands to quickly own people lines can arise”, says Ottmar Kullmer of the Senckenberg research Institute and nature Museum in Frankfurt am Main. “The teeth tell clearly that the Fund has been heard on the island of Luzon, just like we modern humans to the genus Homo,” says Kulmer, a specialist for the teeth of humans, early humans, pre-human and human apes. The crown and roots of the anterior cheek teeth of the Luzon-people resemble rather those of the pre-human genera of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, both of which lived more than two million years ago. The rear molars, however, are best with the modern people to compare. The bones of the fingers and feet resemble more those of Australopithecus-copies, write to Detroit and colleagues.
In the Callao cave in the North of the main Philippine island of Luzon, researchers found in 2007, the first bone of Homo luzonensis.Photo: Callao Cave Archaeology Project
The Interpretation that, on Luzon, an independent human-kind has developed, close to Hublin and Kullmer, both in Détroit research involved, basically – not without uncertainties. “Unfortunately, there is very little fossils,” says Kullmer. “The appearance of the Luzon people can therefore not be reconstructed,” says Hublin. In any case, the discovery show, however, that previously, a large variety of different people lived lines at the same time on the earth. So there was next to Luzon and Flores-people in Siberia, the Denisovaner, in Eurasia, the Neanderthals were at home and in Africa, lived alongside modern man, Homo sapiens, at least also gay naledi in the South of the continent.
An “exciting period”
Hublin, it is not surprising that diversity: “our own species Homo sapiens has, in the last not even a hundred thousand years, an amazing diversity of the pygmies in Central Africa, to the Inuit in the High North.” As before 1.9 million years ago, however, the early human species Homo erectus Africa left, she had much more time to adapt to the different conditions of life in Europe and Asia. Instead of a tree so there was more of a family Bush of different groups of people with different features, which existed side by side each other-with mixed and from which in the course of time, many are extinct again.
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“in the mid-1970s, when I started with the early people research said that all important discoveries, such as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus were already made,” says Hublin. In the meantime, he had been disabused. The early human research through the course of a very exciting era.
