Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #5

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that's how we improve our

understanding of the world.

In this case our own origins.

Darren and Ji are preparing to show

the Red Deer Cave fossils to

a scientific heavy weight,

someone whose judgment could either confirm

or quash their own opinions.

Jeffrey Schwartz is one of the

few scientists in the world

to have studied virtually the

entire human fossil record.

Here professor.

- Wow.

Gosh, the actual things.

Can I touch?

You're welcome to.

That will be super.

So you think that surface

has been modified?

There's some cut marks.

Right, I see that one,

holes in either side of it.

But then you got to break

and then you have to change

in the plane of the bone and

that's what's diagnostic.

Here's an occipital fragment

and I can't find any muscle marking

on it. Nothing.

Nothing at all. Nothing.

Meet Longlin.

Oh, there it is.

Okay, so what's interesting

is the shape of the frontal

so different.

One thing that's very prominent

is that you have this

huge muscular tuberosity.

You would actually see some

kind of more verticality.

That's right, absolutely.

This unusual shielding here in front.

Yeah, oh I see what you're saying.

There's only one specimen I know of

where the cheek region flares out like that

and it's one specimen from about

1.65, 1.7 million years old

from East Africa.

It's one of those unusual things

in the human fossil record

and it certainly isn't like

any living human I studied,

any human skull that I've studied

and I've studied thousands

of them over years.

Certain features of the face here,

you don't see in any living human.

I would call it a different species

but I know that sends off a lot of

alarms and stuff but I think

it's a different thing.

We agree.

This is really one of the top

paleontological experiences in my life.

Fantastic, good.

Fixed our work.

I felt as though this cloud

of doubt that I'd had

about my work, my ideas

for the last five years

to suddenly lifted and then I had actually

for the first time some

real independent support

and verification of what we found.

It was absolutely thrilling.

The big shot, Jeffrey,

Professor Jeffrey are coming

after today's check.

We don't want to move to another project,

move to another set.

I want to continue because it was daring,

we should continue this research,

more productive in the future.

So the Red Deer Cave people

could be the youngest

non Homo sapiens that we

found anywhere in the world.

They're also in East Asia which is an area

that we thought was actually uninhabited

by the time modern humans settled the area.

We've always thought that modern humans,

Neanderthal share a common

ancestor 400,000 years ago.

One of the implications of

the Red Deer Cave people

was that maybe there was a

branching event later on

that in fact maybe a group

batted off the line

that was leading to Homo sapiens

two or 300,000 years ago

and that that group is something like

the Red Deer Cave people,

a group that's almost us but not quite us.

It's an astonishing concept

to imagine a coexistence

of two human groups

that are so similar but also so different.

What would their first

encounter have been like?

This wasn't simply a different tribe.

This was another creature all together.

What discovery means is that

when modern human left

Africa that it wasn't just

the Neanderthals that they encounter.

In fact they met up with the Denisovans,

they met up with the Red Deer Cave people.

It's not just a scenario

of superior modern humans

leaving Africa and taking over the world.

In fact, they had to fight for

it that it wasn't an easy

process and that they were

very complex interactions

along the way.

There's the possibility I guess

with the Red Deer Cave people.

We interacted with them.

What sorts of interactions were there

is the obvious immediate in

the landscape competition

maybe lead to break with them.

Maybe we inherited aspects of our behavior

and culture from them.

Could that interaction have

shaped our own evolution?

What's significant about

the Moludong specimens

is they really demonstrated the

existence at the same time

of different species with

our species Homo sapiens.

And then I think the ultimate question is

why did they disappear?

How did they disappear and why

were the only species still around?

There is one clue.

We know the Red Deer Cave

people was still surviving

at the dawn of the greatest revolution

in the history of human kind.

Beginning about 20,000 years ago,

modern humans began agriculture.

As agriculture developed, it was changing

the people who were engaging in it.

Their rituals, their

relationships to the land,

eventually to even their morphology

but also they began changing

the land through farming.

That may have severely

impacted on remaining groups

of Red Deer Cave people who

were true hunter gatherers.

The farming revolution led to a whole

sweet of new diseases being

experienced by people.

It was the beginnings of

the population explosion

that we think about over the

last few thousand years.

Worldwide there were maybe

a handful of people,

several million people

living as hunter gatherers

and in a fairly quick period

of time that double treble

to the point where we've now

got seven billion people

living across the planet.

No other site in the world

has a cave human remains

that are dated to around the

time that farming is beginning

and it does raise the

possibility that the invention

of farming may have bumped off

the Red Deer Cave people.

If you look at recent human history

what you see is as the

settlments increase in number

and density of human

warfare to like increases.

And in terms of nature,

we're the only really

bellicose or war engaging species

and it may not be a

pleasant thought to think

that we're the cause of the extinction

of these very recent species

that were our relatives.

Whether it was shear bad luck

or forces of a different kind,

the Red Deer Cave people

may have been the last

of nature's experiments

before modern humans were left

as the lone surviving human species.

As to the faith of those

individuals found inside the cave,

there are clues hidden

in the charred remains.

One of the key questions that we ask

when see burnt human bone

is was it cannibalism?

So we look closely to see

the nature of cut marks

and fracturing and burning.

If we look at this material,

we find that there aren't

many cut marks like you would

expect if the meat was cut off

and after cooking in the fire.

What also is really

unusual that we never see

with cannibalism is that

after the bones were burnt,

they were painted with ochre.

Now, if this had been simply used for food,

the bones would had been discarded

and we would see burning but not ochre.

But with many of the pieces

from Maludong, we see both.

So, I'm convinced that there

is a form of burial practice

happening rather than cannibalism.

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