Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #3

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I got on the phone, I rung

my colleague and I said,

"Are you sure these are right?"

The Maludong fossils were just 14 1/2

thousand years old and the Longlin skull

was even younger, only 11

1/2 thousand years old.

I couldn't believe it.

I was absolutely flabbergasted.

In fact, I jumped out of my chair

and I was jumping around

the room like a kid.

This means that the Red Deer Cave people

were alive at the same

time and in the same place

as modern human hunter gatherers.

There Red Deer Cave people are unlike any

modern human we've seen before

whether 150 or 150,000 years old.

This means they're either

very unusual modern humans

or perhaps belong to a different group,

different species but they're not us.

The suggestion of a new human species

is arguably the boldest statement

an evolutionary scientist can make.

In March 2012, the team take a daring step

to publish this possibility.

Distinctly odd fossil evidence found...

The so called Red Deer Cave people

had flat faces with bore noses.

Even though a computing picture it does...

It wouldn't be the first discovery

that's led to debate

over whether a scientist

has found a new species.

I'm a little skeptic about the last one.

But they're reluctant to

call it a new species

just yet and some other

experts have their doubts.

In a way, it's the sort of thing

you wouldn't ask for because

it's so challenging,

so confronting.

The fact that they were just

so weird and so young for me

was exciting but I knew

I faced a big challenge

to convince my colleagues the significance

of what we'd found.

In the world of paleoanthropology,

the same fossils inspire radically

different interpretations

among scientists depending

on which school of thought

they belong to.

It's been called a science

of exquisitely informed speculation.

Nobody looks at a fossil

with a completely open mind.

I suppose to some extent

also we see what we think.

So, you come to a fossil

and you have an idea

about the way you think in evolution worked

and the first thing you do

is try and fit that fossil

into your world view.

I think that's human nature.

This is a science which struggles

with possibly the biggest questions of all.

Who are we and what makes a modern human?

For the past 30 years, our understanding

of what sets us apart

from other human species

has perhaps been most influenced

by paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer.

If we look just at the morphology, for me

everyone alive today share certain

features in the skeleton.

So we have a high and rounded skull.

When we look at the Longlin skull

and we look at the forehead,

we can see that it does have

some modern human like features.

So, it has a forehead that arcs

backwards, curves backwards.

We have a small face tucked

under the brain case.

And the face is actually quite

short like a modern human.

We have a chin on the lower jaw.

We have a lightly built skeleton.

So these sorts of features

are shared around the planet

and for me they diagnose

what a modern human is anatomically.

So there are a couple of

modern human features

but then there are all these features

that are really very ancient.

If we have a look at the lower jaw,

this really important feature

that we see in modern humans

have a triangular chin is actually missing.

We can't see it and the teeth are massive.

On top of that, it also has some unusual,

some unique features that are found only

in the Red Deer Cave people.

So it has quite a prominent brow

and the cheeks are incredibly flat

and they flare out to

the sides of the faces,

they curve around the skull.

And when we put them together and we see

that it has this massive jaw

that the two jaws together

sit well forward to the face

and that's really unusual.

Certainly for modern human

it's a very ancient feature.

These bones aren't modern

and they're not meant to

be around at that time

but yet they are.

14 1/2 thousand years ago, Southwest China

was released from the grip of the Ice Age

and filled with lush forested

basins teeming with life.

This was the world of the

Red Deer Cave people.

This was a land of the oldest

and most isolated mountain peaks,

the deepest valleys and the

biggest rivers of all of Asia.

It was a landscape that

had an indelible impact

on its people.

Could this hotspot of human diversity

have given rise to isolated

groups that looks so different?

What's actually led to the unusual features

on the Red Deer Cave people

we simply don't know yet

but one possibility is that

it was the development

of a population that was isolated

that had particular environment conditions,

maybe a particular kind of diet required,

stronger jaw muscles

which modified the face.

That's a possibility.

There could be environmental

features which change

the shape of the skull and on the body.

Could the Red Deer Cave people

simply be modern humans who have moved back

into more primitive looking beings

because of something in the water?

In evolution we call that a reversal.

Time precedent in human evolution.

There are no other examples

that I can think of,

of any human group that was isolated

for tens of thousands of years and then

suddenly it's anatomy

emerged after that time

to look like ancestors

of hundreds of thousands

of years ago.

In my understanding in my

experience it runs counter

to our understanding of seven million years

of human evolution.

The problem for me is that

if they're modern human

and they lack so many features,

so many characteristics of modern human.

So if we say okay, maybe they're early,

very early modern human,

very primitive modern human.

If that's the case then why aren't they

100,000 years old?

As Darren and Ji pondered the puzzle

of the Red Deer Cave people,

other scientists offer

their own explanations.

Chris Stringer and other

people who suggested

it could be hybrid.

I think the Red Deer Cave finds

are extremely important.

I don't think they represent

a distinct species from us

but they really do document the variation

in modern human populations

in the last 50,000 years.

Chris Stringer is the architect

of the out of Africa

theory and firmly believed

that modern humans replaced

all other ancient species

as they migrated across the world.

My view was we had a recent African origin

and that could be virtually

100% of the story.

But what we've learned

in the last few years is

that there was indeed some interbreeding

with the Neanderthals, with people over in

the far east called the Denisovans

who we've only really learned about

in the last couple of years from their DNA.

In 2010 in another remote cave

nestled within the Altay

mountains of Southern Siberia,

ancient DNA was found,

preserved within a finger bone

and a single tooth.

From these tiny fragments,

scientists decoded

the entire genome of a new group

they called the Denisovans.

Not only we have this

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