A scientific reconstruction of the head of this mysterious creature discovered in South Africa by American paleontologist Lee Berger. The scientist presented one cast of Homo's skull on ice to his Russian colleagues.
The fruits of scientific work were presented on Sunday at the National Research Technological University "MISiS". Homo ice is half-man, half-monkey. However, instead of shedding light on the origins of mankind, he turned out to be a link that does not fit well into the evolutionary chain, explains Russian anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky.
“Homo icing combines some features that are more characteristic of primates, such as the brain, with the latest signs of evolutionary development, in particular teeth and feet, which bring them closer to modern humans,” says Drobyshevsky. “Naledi are extremely peculiar. Their growth was about one and a half meters, the brain weighed from 400 to 600 grams, just in the interval between Australopithecus (upright primates) and Homo habilis (Homo habilis), which is considered the earliest man.
In the first analysis of the bones of fifteen individuals found in the deep South African Rising Star Cave, scientists at first thought that they were the remains of the first people who lived about three million years ago. Their surprise knew no bounds when, during dating, it turned out that Homo ice lived only 300 thousand years ago, at a time when the Rhodesian man (Homo rhodesiensis) - one of the closest to modern man - settled with might and main in the South African steppes.
“The coexistence of these two species in the same territory proves that the evolution of mankind could have gone along a completely different path,” says Drobyshevsky. Other human species also lived in the same era, but they did not differ as much as humans and chimpanzees (as in the case of Australopithecus and Homo habilis), or they lived on different continents or in territories separated by insurmountable geographical barriers.
It remains a mystery how Homo ice and Rhodesian man interacted with each other, which some scientists refer to as Homo sapiens. “They could both cooperate with each other and be at enmity. There are genes of some African peoples, such as Pygmies or Bushmen, that have not yet been deciphered,” says the Russian anthropologist. As in the DNA of European sapiens there is something from Neanderthals, so the undeciphered links of the genetics of African peoples could be the legacy of Homo ice, although in order to unravel this mystery, it will be necessary to decipher the genome of a new species.
On the other hand, the icing brain, comparable in size to the brain of the very first person, and its chest, which, like primates, are not adapted for speech, indicate that the intellectual abilities of the icing were poorly developed. Their only cultural artifacts can be found in the same place, next to their remains, in a cave more than 16 meters deep, which can only be entered through a very narrow opening 20 centimeters wide, which from the very beginning excludes the possibility that they lived there. The most probable, according to Drobyshevsky, is that undersized icings buried the dead there, but not as a ritual, but for hygienic reasons.
The jaw and teeth of these hominids are even smaller than those of modern humans, which refutes one of the main claims of the theory of evolution. Until now, it was believed that the size of the teeth decreased in the course of human evolution. Drobyshevsky says that the bending of the fingers on the hands, which is greater than that of modern monkeys, on the contrary, proves that at some point the ice could involute in order to adapt to the environment.
Drobyshevsky says that, despite the shape of the ice brush, almost the same as that of a modern person, and the ability to produce tools, the bending of the fingers refutes all previously existing theories. New data allow scientists to understand that ice walked straight and used tools, like the first person, but at the same time could climb trees like a monkey. “Some of the tools that scientists have found before and attributed to sapiens, in fact, could belong to ice. Nothing from the icing culture has come down to us, but the shape of their hand indicates that they could produce tools, although their brains were small,” says Drobyshevsky.
On September 10, 2015, another paleoanthropological sensation broke out. In South Africa, a presentation of a new fossil man took place. An article about the discovery was published the same day in eLife magazine. The man was named Homo naled. In the language of the local Sotho people, this word means "Star".
It turns out amusingly - "Man-Star". However, the "Man-Star" unexpectedly turned out to be a degenerate. Nobody expected this! But first things first.
Exactly two years ago, on September 13, 2013, the bones of these people were discovered by two sports cavers Stephen Tucker and Rick Hunter in the Rising Star Cave near Johannesburg. The information was clearly timed to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the discovery.
Rice. 1. Kiss with a degenerate. South African Vice President Cyril Ramafora kisses the skull of Homo Naledi (Star Man) at the presentation of the find on September 10, 2015. Photo from the presentation.
So, in the cave of Rising Star (South Africa) another transitional link between a man and a monkey Homo non-lady (Homo naled) was discovered. This is a man, one and a half meters tall with a very small brain, approximately like a chimpanzee 460 - 560 cubic meters. cm.
Probably, the volume of the brain was greatly reduced in relation to the original. Homo icing has a lot of human signs like modern people: long legs, a foot with an instep and two transverse and longitudinal arches, small human teeth.
Rice. 2. Reconstruction of Homo ice. Made by artist John Gurche. Narrow shoulders with crooked clavicles are well shown. This is a sign of wood climbing. October 2015 National Geographic magazine.
But this dim-witted man has already adapted to tree-climbing. He retained the human morphology of the hand with an enlarged thumb, but there are already elongated and curved phalanges of other fingers. This is a clear sign of wood climbing.
In other words, from man to monkey, and not vice versa!
The age of the find has not been determined. The bones of the skeletons of 15 individuals (what was left of them) simply lay on the floor of the cave. And nobody touched them for maybe several million years. Degraded people climbed into a dark cave at the risk of their lives and remained there. It is assumed that these ape people performed a ritual burial of their fellow tribesmen in the cave. It is not yet clear when the transition to tree climbing occurred.
Rice. 3. Brush Homo ice with curved phalanges.
Usually transitional links are not preserved. But here we have a unique situation. The bones were preserved due to the fact that subsequently no one else could penetrate into the blind compartment of this cave, called Dinaledi, neither animals nor people.
Homo naledi for the first time clearly and clearly refuted the labor theory of Engels ("Dialectic of Nature") and the simial (monkey) theory of anthropogenesis (Darwin, Buffon).
Homo ice is one of the many "transitional forms" from upright walking to tree climbing. There were many such forms in the past. It is known about Ardipithecus Ramidus (6 million years) Ethiopia, Chadian Sahelanthropus (7 million years) Republic of Chad.
Thus, multiple involution took place in the past: the transformation of man into apes. The simial (monkey) theory of anthropogenesis must be discarded as untenable. Everything was exactly the opposite!
The scheme of involutional variability also works for Australopithecus, who lived in the period 4.5 - 1 million years ago from the present, as well as the most ancient, ancient and modern man.
"New" people who appeared repeatedly on Earth, obviously in a small number, are not recorded in any way in the paleoanthropological chronicle. Finding the remains of several tens, even hundreds and thousands of "first" people on Earth, or rather, in the ground, is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But when the human population adapts to the conditions of earthly existence, multiplies and masters different habitats, then the chance of finding at least one incomplete skull or one dilapidated bone increases. But even these chances are still not enough. A stable population of people must exist in a certain area for a long time. And the conditions for the preservation of their remains must be extremely favorable.
However, people tend to bury the dead, or even destroy the remains of the dead, for example, burn them. This significantly reduces the chance of finding the skeletons of the most ancient and ancient people. Soil acids, microorganisms and soil animals will destroy the corpse and after some time the bones of the skeleton.
Rice. 4. Two stages of involutional variability in intelligent people who populated the Earth many times and the illusion of evolution.
Even if human bones fall into favorable conditions for the preservation of the remains (caves, karst cracks, asphalt and oil puddles, swamps, mineral deposits, permafrost, glaciers, etc.), they do not have time to petrify and are destroyed under the influence of external aggressive factors immediately after the temporary storage conditions of the bones cease.
The remains of Homo icing survived thanks to a unique set of circumstances. A narrow hole led into the cave compartment (Dinaledi), where they were stored, and no one (neither animals nor humans) penetrated into it for a long time. If the bones had lain in this cave for ten million years or more, they would have inevitably collapsed along with the cave itself. The remains died if animals, water began to penetrate into the isolated cave compartment, the microclimate would change there, etc.
Rice. 5. Plan of the Rising Star cave with a blind hall called Dinaledi, into which a very narrow manhole leads. October 2015 National Geographic magazine.
That is why we do not have the remains of a man numbering tens and hundreds of millions of years. The ecological and behavioral status of a person does not contribute to the preservation of his remains for a long time.
People usually exist on this planet for a brief moment in terms of geological time and their number is small. Then people begin to rapidly degrade. The population of human degenerates multiplies and changes, looking for a favorable eco-niche for its life. After that, it can already leave behind a small trace in the form of remains that have not yet been petrified, caught in temporary favorable conditions. Thus, human degenerates are much more likely to leave a mark than their human ancestors.
So, the bones of the Floresian man, nicknamed the hobbit by journalists because of his short stature and caricature appearance, did not have time to petrify. Flores man lived 74 - 13 thousand years ago.
Its remains were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. The bones were like "wet blotting paper" and spread right in the hands of paleoanthropologists-researchers. They had to be secured from destruction with a special compound. It is quite clear that for a long time these bones could not be preserved in the ground.
The Floresian man was a little over one meter tall, and had a head the size of a grapefruit (380 cc). It showed signs of degradation.
Rice. 6. Floresian man as a degradant.
The same can be said about the recently discovered Homo icing, whose presentation of a new species took place on September 10, 2015 in South Africa. He could be called "a foolish man." He has a catastrophically small brain volume (560 - 460 cc).
Personally, I prefer to call Homo naledi the "South African Anthropothecus" (monkey-man) as opposed to the Javanese Pithecanthropus (monkey-man) discovered by Eugène Dubois in 1890 on the island of Java. By the way, the brain volume of Pithecanthropus was twice that of Homo ice (900 - 1200 cc).
The main feature is that the icing retained human morphology: long legs, a foot with a rise, a hand with an enlarged and developed thumb. But the rest of the fingers of the hand are curved and had long phalanges. It speaks of wood climbing. The shoulders resembled the shoulders of great apes.
This is how the transformation of a man into a monkey happens! We do not know how this transformation ended. What kind of monkey did the icing turn into and did it turn at all? We don't even know exactly when this degenerate lived. The main thing is that ice refuted Engels' labor theory (F. Engels "Dialectics of Nature" 1882).
According to Engels, the hand of an upright monkey gradually turned into the working hand of a man. Here we see the reverse process of the "labor hand" of a person turns into a monkey's hand! It would seem that Engels is not very popular today, but there is a whole taxon of ancient people Homo ergaster (working man). One must think that anthropologists share the ideas of Engels to this day. And only a unique case helped us to discover these remains as a "transitional form" - but not between a monkey and a man, but between a man and a tree-climbing creature.
Homo icing could also be called "a non-working person." But this is not to be expected from evolutionists. As pioneers, they are always faithful to the cause and precepts of the great Darwin and Buffon with their simial (monkey) theory of anthropogenesis - humanization.
The importance of finding Homo icing can hardly be overestimated. An almost complete degradant skeleton was discovered for the first time. This is a rare stroke of luck for a paleoanthropologist. All other skeletal remains of the most ancient and ancient people are extremely fragmentary. This gave the evolutionists room for all sorts of speculation.
In particular, they have for a long time attributed the australopithecine foot to a transitional stage between the monkey's foot with the opposed thumb and the human foot with the adducted thumb parallel to the other toes. At the same time, no real Australopithecus foot bones were found then. They fantasized and declared it to be true.
Now it turned out that human degenerates have completely human feet and the first to begin to change is also a completely human hand. It adapts to tree climbing much earlier than the foot.
Australopithecus, which are considered the ancestors of modern humans, in fact, are not. They are only two-legged degraders who have retained their straight legs from their human ancestors. They also have an adaptation for tree climbing. But they went the other way. In this sense, they are somewhat reminiscent of the ancestors of early and predatory dinosaurs - theropods, who also involution on their own two feet, and did not climb trees like monkeys, or get down on all fours, as animals did.
Rice. Fig. 7. Exhibition of fossil degradants (reconstruction) from left to right: female Afar Australopithecus - "Lucy" - 3.2 million years ago; "boy from Turkana" - 1.6 million years ago, Homo ice - "Man - Star" - age is not determined. Narrow shoulders with crooked collarbones, a characteristic sign of tree climbing, are clearly visible near the ice. October 2015 National Geographic magazine.
Modern man (Cro-Magnon in the broadest sense of the word), who appeared on the planet 70-60 thousand years ago, is fundamentally different from his predecessors.
The population of modern humans probably never lost contact with their cosmic handlers to degrade. Although, how do you know...
Alexander Belov, paleoanthropologist
Human remains of Homo naledi were found deep in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa in 2013. Only the most slender members of the expedition could get to the place where the bones lay: they had to get through the “skin maker” - a narrow hole underground. For homo icing, the skinner was not a problem - they were very small. The size of their brain did not exceed the size of the brain of modern chimpanzees. But a study of the skulls and other bones of people on ice showed that they were not so simple: their skeleton bizarrely combined features characteristic of the ancient and primitive representatives of the hominin tribe - such as Australopithecus - and for more highly developed species, such as a skilled man. .
Yesterday in a magazine eLife three articles were published (, ,) by an international group of scientists led by anthropologist Lee Berger, who led the first expedition that discovered Homo naledi. This time, scientists presented the results that allow dating the find: according to isotope analysis and analysis by the method of electron paramagnetic resonance, the remains Homo naledi lay in the cave from 335 to 236 thousand years. This means that the little ice people could live in Africa at the same time as Homo sapien s.
For people with such primitive features - a shortened nape, low and short frontal lobes, a chest that is wide below, curved fingers - this is a very early dating: these features are characteristic of Australopithecus, who lived not 300 thousand, but 2 million years ago. On the other hand, progressive features Homo naledi- such as the length of the fingers and signs of upright walking - indicate that these people were in many ways close to the later representatives of the genus Homo.
Experts note that after the discovery of " hobbits" - undersized (up to a meter) hominids from the island of Flores in Indonesia, who looked extremely primitive, but lived only 50 thousand years ago, it is easier for anthropologists to imagine that other types of people lived on earth in parallel with modern people , with a much less progressive anatomy.
Despite the relative "youth" of the remains H. naledi, this species may be evolutionarily close to the oldest representatives of the genus Homo, who lived up to 2.8 million years ago. It is quite possible that new finds will help unravel the mystery of its origin and life: due to the inaccessibility of the cave, not everything was extracted from it. Perhaps the cave hides tools made by long-fingered hands. H. naledi(until now their tools have not been found), or new, more complete skeletons and skulls of better preservation - like the almost complete skull described in one of the three articles, found in the dead end of the Rising Star cave, previously hidden from the eyes of researchers.
Recently, numerous bones of a previously unknown species of primitive people, called Homo naledi. In many ways H. naledi reminiscent of the habilis, other early Homo and even Australopithecus, which suggested a very respectable age of the finds. However, datings obtained by several independent methods in different laboratories showed that these people lived only 335-236 thousand years ago, simultaneously with much more advanced representatives of the human race. Also published data on new finds of bones H. naledi, among which there is a well-preserved skull, in another corner of the same cave. All the bones clearly belonged to people from the same population. New data make significant adjustments to the prevailing ideas about anthropogenesis.
Opening Homo naledi became the loudest sensation in paleoanthropology over the past two or three years (see: Man from Dinaledi - a new species of primitive people, "Elements", 09/14/2015). However, it was still impossible to truly assess the significance of the discovery, since almost the most important thing remained unknown - the age of the finds.
Recall that in the morphology H. naledi primitive "Australopithecine" features are combined with advanced "human" ones (a detailed analysis of the anatomy of the new species is given in the articles by S. V. Drobyshevsky on the Anthropogenesis.ru website, see links at the end of the news). If the evolution of our ancestors were linear, as many thought 30–40 years ago, that is, it would represent a continuous progressive development from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, then Homo naledi it would be logical to place it somewhere near the habilis. In this case, the expected age H. naledi- about one and a half or two million years.
However, today it is firmly established that the evolution of hominids was not at all linear. On that branch of the evolutionary tree that includes forms closer to modern man than to chimpanzees, there were many forks and dead ends. The directions of specialization in different lineages could vary greatly, and "evolutionarily advanced" (very different from the common ancestor) species often coexisted with "primitive" ones (which retained more ancestral traits).
It follows from this that it is simply impossible to determine the real age of a particular species of hominids only by its morphology. H. naledi could turn out to be an ancient representative of one of the branches of the early radiation of the genus Homo. He could even be the direct ancestor of erectus and sapiens, although the combination of primitive and advanced features H. habilis better suited for this role. It might just as well have been a dead end or a "living fossil" that retained its primitive traits at a time when other members of the human race had already advanced far along the path of larger brains and more complex behavior. Similar examples have been known before. The brightest of them is the famous "hobbits" from the island of Flores, who had a monkey-sized brain, but lived relatively recently (see: New ancient remains of people from the island of Flores talk about the relationship of "hobbits" with erectus, "Elements", 06/08/2016) .
Therefore, anthropologists were looking forward to when at least some dating would appear. H. naledi- if, of course, these bones, found in an unusual geological context, can be dated at all. And finally, this long-awaited information has been obtained and published. May 9 in the magazine eLife three large articles appeared at once by the South African paleoanthropologist Lee Rogers Berger and his colleagues, the discoverers Homo naledi, with invaluable new information about this mysterious representative of the human race.
Deposits containing bones H. naledi, were formed inside the cave and are unconsolidated (non-petrified, loose) fine-grained rock with interlayers of sinter formations (see Flowstone). The article presents the results of a comprehensive and very rigorous analysis of these deposits.
Lime deposits were dated using the uranium-thorium method (see: Uranium-thorium dating). The results obtained in different laboratories coincided quite accurately with each other. Analysis of multiple samples formed both before and after entering the bone cave H. naledi, made it possible to understand the history of the formation of cave deposits. In particular, it became clear that wet periods, when streaks formed, alternated with relatively dry ones. These and other details revealed during the study helped scientists to select and refine analytical approaches step by step, gradually reducing uncertainty in the main question of bone age.
Uranium-thorium analysis of teeth H. naledi, as well as a baboon's tooth, which entered the cave much earlier, helped to decipher the multi-stage history of the introduction of uranium into fossil teeth, which occurred during wet periods. The introduction of uranium into the bones after burial leads to an underestimation of the dating (rejuvenation), so this approach only showed that the teeth H. naledi certainly older than 70,000 years and with a high probability older than 200,000 years.
The combined method of uranium series and electron spin resonance was applied to the same teeth (see Electron spin resonance dating; R. Grün, H. P. Schwarcz, 1988. ESR dating of tooth enamel: Coupled correction for U-uptake and U-series disequilibrium), and for wall rock samples, the method of optically stimulated luminescence dating (see Optically stimulated luminescence). These approaches gave the most reliable results. The layers of sinter formations were also subjected to paleomagnetic analysis (see: paleomagnetic dating). Other dating methods that researchers tried to apply, including radiocarbon dating and uranium-lead, turned out to be unsuitable for this material for one reason or another. In particular, radiocarbon dating proved impossible because no collagen was preserved in the bones (and later it became clear that the bones were too old for radiocarbon dating).
As a result, the authors had at their disposal a multitude of datings obtained by several independent methods both for bones and for different layers of cave deposits, some of which were formed before and others after the formation of the bone-bearing layer. An analysis of the entire body of data led the authors to the conclusion that the age of the bones is almost certainly in the range from 236,000 to 335,000 years.
Thus, the Dinaledi people lived much later than their morphology would suggest. They were a kind of living fossils - primitive contemporaries of the advanced late representatives of the human race, who were not inferior to us in terms of brain size, who owned fire and sophisticated (Late Acheulean and Middle Paleolithic) stone processing technologies. Until now, it was believed that during this period (see Middle Stone Age) representatives of only one evolutionary line of late homo, which included the direct ancestors of modern humans, and the ancestors of the Neanderthals and Denisovans had already separated from this line and gone to Eurasia. All other, more primitive African hominids (Australopithecines, Paranthropus and early species of the genus Homo) were considered completely extinct by this time. Now the picture is much more complicated.
The authors do not exclude the possibility of a hybrid origin H. naledi. There is nothing impossible in this. Interspecific hybridization is widespread in mammals, including great apes (see: Ancestors of modern chimpanzees and bonobos repeatedly interbred with each other, Elements, 11/01/2016). Apparently, it takes millions of years for the formation of complete reproductive incompatibility between the separated species of mammals. Therefore, it is possible that all Pleistocene Homo could interbreed with each other, and even with Australopithecus. Based on the mosaic morphology H. naledi, this species could be a hybrid between some advanced Homo and late Australopithecus. It is not clear how to test this hypothesis. Attempts to extract DNA from bones H. naledi until they were successful.
According to the authors, H. naledi had to make stone tools. This is evidenced by the advanced features of the structure of their hands and fingers, which bring them closer to Neanderthals and sapiens and are absent in Australopithecus and Habilis, as well as small teeth (it is believed that the decrease in the teeth of our ancestors was partly due to the use of tools that made powerful teeth unnecessary). ). It turns out that some of the tools hitherto implicitly attributed to African erectus or "archaic sapiens" could actually have been made by other hominids.
Thinking about behavior H. naledi, Berger and his colleagues do not disregard the important question of how human remains could have got into the hard-to-reach corners of the karst cave. There are no signs of bone transfer by groundwater. There are no bones of other large animals there, which means that the cave was hardly a natural trap where people and animals could accidentally fall and die. The bones show no evidence of predator teeth or stone tools, although bones found in other South African caves often bear such marks. Apparently, the accumulations of human remains in the Dinaledi and Lesedi chambers cannot be attributed to predators, scavengers, or cannibals. According to the authors, the most likely explanation for these clusters is purposeful human behavior. The authors seriously suggest that H. naledi could bury their relatives in the cave.
One way or another, the discoveries of Berger and his colleagues should draw the closest attention of paleoanthropologists to the South African Middle Pleistocene. Therefore, we can hope that new data will soon allow us to confirm or refute the extravagant hypotheses put forward by the discoverers. Homo naledi.
Sources:
1) Paul H. G. M. Dirks, Eric M. Roberts, Hannah Hilbert-Wolf, Jan D. Kramers, John Hawks, Anthony Dosseto, Mathieu Duval, Marina Elliott, Mary Evans, Rainer Grün, John Hellstrom, Andy I. R. Herries, Renaud Joannes-Boyau , Tebogo V. Makhubela, Christa J. Placzek, Jessie Robbins, Carl Spandler, Jelle Wiersma, Jon Woodhead, Lee R. Berger. The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa // eLife. 2017.6:e24231.
2) John Hawks, Marina Elliott, Peter Schmid, Steven E. Churchill, Darryl J. de Ruiter, Eric M. Roberts, Hannah Hilbert-Wolf, Heather M. Garvin, Scott A. Williams, Lucas K. Delezene, Elen M. Feuerriegel, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, Tracy L. Kivell, Myra F. Laird, Gaokgatlhe Tawane, Jeremy M. DeSilva, Shara E. Bailey, Juliet K. Brophy, Marc R. Meyer, Matthew M. Skinner, Matthew W. Tocheri, Caroline VanSickle, Christopher S. Walker, Timothy L. Campbell, Brian Kuhn, Ashley Kruger, Steven Tucker, Alia Gurtov, Nompumelelo Hlophe, Rick Hunter, Hannah Morris, Becca Peixotto, Maropeng Ramalepa, Dirk van Rooyen, Mathabela Tsikoane, Pedro Boshoff, Paul H. G. M. Dirks, Lee R. Berger. New fossil remains of Homo naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa // eLife. 2017.6:e24232.
3) Lee R. Berger, John Hawks, Paul H. G. M. Dirks, Marina Elliott, Eric M. Roberts. Homo naledi and Pleistocene hominin evolution in subequatorial Africa // eLife. 2017.6:e24234.
This week, a group of Russian scientists presented in Moscow a scientific reconstruction of the head of this mysterious creature discovered in South Africa by American paleontologist Lee Berger. The scientist presented one cast of Homo's skull on ice to his Russian colleagues.
The fruits of scientific work were presented on Sunday at the National Research Technological University "MISiS". Homo ice is half-man, half-monkey. However, instead of shedding light on the origins of mankind, he turned out to be a link that does not fit well into the evolutionary chain, explains Russian anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky.
“Homo ice combines some of the features that are more characteristic of primates, such as the brain, with the latest signs of evolutionary development, in particular teeth and feet, which bring them closer to modern humans,” says Drobyshevsky. “Naledi are extremely peculiar. Their growth was about one and a half meters, the brain weighed from 400 to 600 grams, just in the interval between Australopithecus (upright primates) and Homo habilis (Homo habilis), which is considered the earliest man.
In the first analysis of the bones of fifteen individuals found in the deep South African Rising Star Cave, scientists at first thought they were the remains of the first people who lived about three million years ago. Their surprise knew no bounds when, during dating, it turned out that Homo iced people lived only 300 thousand years ago, at a time when the Rhodesian man (Homo rhodesiensis), one of the closest to modern man, was settling with might and main in the South African steppes.
“The coexistence of these two species in the same territory proves that the evolution of mankind could have gone along a completely different path,” says Drobyshevsky. Other human species also lived in the same era, but they did not differ as much as humans and chimpanzees (as in the case of Australopithecus and Homo habilis), or they lived on different continents or in territories separated by insurmountable geographical barriers.
Context
Finds in China change the history of Homo sapiens
BBC Russian service 10/15/2015What is in us from primitive ancestors?
Polityka 09.08.2015Training Like a Caveman: Arnold Jacobs Goes Primal
The Daily Beast 04/11/2012 It remains a mystery how Homo iced and Rhodesian man interacted with each other, which some scientists refer to as Homo sapiens. “They could both cooperate with each other and be at enmity. There are genes of some African peoples, such as the Pygmies or the Bushmen, who have not yet been able to decipher,” says the Russian anthropologist. As in the DNA of European sapiens there is something from Neanderthals, so the undeciphered links of the genetics of African peoples could be the legacy of Homo ice, although in order to unravel this mystery, it will be necessary to decipher the genome of a new species.On the other hand, the icing brain, comparable in size to the brain of the very first person, and its chest, which, like primates, are not adapted for speech, indicate that the intellectual abilities of the icing were poorly developed. Their only cultural artifacts can be found in the same place, next to their remains, in a cave more than 16 meters deep, which can only be entered through a very narrow opening 20 centimeters wide, which from the very beginning excludes the possibility that they lived there. The most probable, according to Drobyshevsky, is that undersized icings buried the dead there, but not as a ritual, but for hygienic reasons.
The jaw and teeth of these hominids are even smaller than those of modern humans, which refutes one of the main claims of the theory of evolution. Until now, it was believed that the size of the teeth decreased in the course of human evolution. Drobyshevsky says that the bending of the fingers on the hands, which is greater than that of modern monkeys, on the contrary, proves that at some point the ice could involute in order to adapt to the environment.
Drobyshevsky says that, despite the shape of the ice brush, almost the same as that of a modern person, and the ability to produce tools, the bending of the fingers refutes all previously existing theories. New data allow scientists to understand that ice walked straight and used tools, like the first person, but at the same time could climb trees like a monkey. “Some of the tools that scientists have found before and attributed to sapiens, in fact, could belong to ice. Nothing from the icing culture has come down to us, but the shape of their hand indicates that they could produce tools, although their brains were small, ”says Drobyshevsky.
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