Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #2

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things in the past.

Maybe we just haven't been

looking in the right places.

There are vast expanses

of unexplored territory across Asia.

Scientists have barely

scratched the surface

of what lies beneath.

In 2008, Darren and Ji

made their first journey

back to the Red Deer Cave.

We didn't really know how the site was.

When we started working here,

there were suggestions

that it could had been towards

the end of the Ice Age

that there was a very little chance

that it could have been considered be older

and that was an exciting

prospect, exciting opportunity.

When you start digging a site like this,

you're aware of the fact that

you're actually the first

people to be exposing

things from the ground.

You're the first people to see these things

since the people who actually used the cave

tens of thousands of years ago.

And it gives you a real

connection to your ancestors

to the way that we lived

for millions of years

in our evolution.

And there's always the

excitement if you don't know

what's gonna be revealed by the next stroke

of the trail of the brush there.

And what was revealed

were layers and layers of ash.

This ash is as fine as you would say

if the fire was built only last week.

It's really quite incredible.

The preservation is just extraordinary

and you can see pieces of charcoal

and these are in fact

is actually burnt clay.

So it's soil that was on top of the fire.

It was so hot that it's baked it.

And when we look at the house

we actually find animal bones

and animal teeth.

And so they've actually come

in and they have cooked

particularly deer bones and then

they butch them on the side.

So these amazingly thick layers

of ash represent huge fires

that were being built up

in the cave over a period

about a thousand years.

It's probably the deepest

ash sequence or half

that's been found in China,

possibly one of the largest in the world.

The Red Deer Cave was

just beginning to reveal

fascinating glimpses in the

Stone Age life in China

and that it all went wrong.

My heart sunk when we found

what we thought was a bit of pottery.

Pottery is one of the most enduring

of manmade materials but it

is a very recent innovation.

I was hoping to find a site

that was tens of thousand years old.

Maybe a site that might tell

us about the earliest people

in the area but instead I

thought we'd found a site

that was only a few thousand years old.

We were feeling disappointed actually.

We thought maybe the site was just another

early farming site that maybe

in fact it wasn't going to be

the site that might give

us some real insights

of our understanding of human evolution.

But the mystery of the Red Deer Cave

was far from over.

Back at the museum, sacks

of fossils collected

from the original excavation

were pulled out of the coffins.

Until now they had been long forgotten.

We really had no idea just how many bones

there were, how rich the site was.

There were bags and bags of these fossils

that had been removed,

that were just waiting to be studied.

When Darren and Ji examined the bones,

they were shocked.

I've never seen a set of human remains

like this ever before.

Every bone that we looked at had

been modified in some ways.

Some had been cut.

Some had been burned and

others painted in ochre.

They've got these massive fires in the cave

and sometimes they throw on complete limbs,

entire body parts and other

times it was part body,

sometimes even just the bones themselves.

When you find evidence for

the burning of human bones,

you always think that there

are two possibilities.

One of those could be cremation

in some sort of ceremony

associated with burial or death.

The other of course is the

very real possibility

that human remains were actually caught.

Could cannibalism be at the heart

of the Red Deer Cave mystery?

Within the cave's walls

are whispering echoes

of a macabre event and clues

that don't make scientific sense.

The human remains from Red Deer Cave

had become a Stone Age

mystery and this mystery

was about to get a lot more complicated.

In 1996 while moving artifact

from a provincial museum

to its institute, Ji

noticed a curious block

of rock on a shelf.

The rock had been discovered

by a lone geologist

at a place called Longlin, 300 kilometers

northeast of Red Deer Cave.

It had sat on the shelf

unnoticed for three decades.

Ji said he had something to show me,

a surprise, a little present.

Ji was holding a rock that

had a skull inside it.

I looked at it and thought what is this,

this look like something

that could be hundreds

of thousands of years old.

Why is he showing me this?

What does he wanna do with this?

And that moment actually changed the course

of our research together.

They had just unlocked the door

into China's mysterious

collections when Ji discovered

yet another forgotten fossil

from the Longlin site.

It was a big surprise because I didn't know

that there was a jaw but also

they've been put together

in such a way that that actually

made an artificial chin,

a fake chin look like a modern human.

And Ji and I studied it really carefully

and we actually found that

the bones fitted together

naturally in quite a different way

and we had a very different looking jaw.

It would take two years of pain staking

reconstruction but finally

the skull was liberated

from the rock.

It was the weirdest looking

thing I've ever seen.

Darren is convinced it

belongs with the jaw.

What did I see?

Something I've made up.

I was confused, I was

elated, I was perplexed.

It had this really bizarre mix

of features, unexpected mix.

There were hints of modern human features.

There were these really

ancient looking features.

In my own mind I didn't know

what I was gonna do with this.

This confusing mix of features

bears a striking resemblance to those found

in the fossils from Maludong.

So we thought that the

best way to approach this

given that we thought

they were quite similar

was to have them in the same population,

have them as belonging to the same group.

Now, Darren and Ji are confronted

with someone or perhaps something

they really did not expect to meet.

They had come face to face

with the Red Deer Cave people.

This primitive looking creature once ran

to the prehistoric forests of Yunnan.

The question is, just how long ago?

That face, I mean that's not

a modern human face, that

level of projection like that

is what you see in Africa

maybe two million years ago,

one and a half million years ago.

That's not...

To make sense of these archaic

looking fossils, the

team needed to find out

how old they were.

Luckily within the cavity of the skull

embedded in the rock, they discovered

tiny pieces of charcoal.

These, together with charcoal

remnants of the ancient fires

at the Red Deer Cave was

sent for radiocarbon dating.

I was sent the dating results

and I didn't believe the numbers.

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