Jaw Bone of Unknown Human Species Discovered on Taiwanese Island
Researchers in Taiwan may have discovered a new species courtesy an ancient jaw bone found by fishermen.
The prehistoric human could have lived anywhere between 200,000 years and 10,000 years ago, Sputnik International reported. This timeframe places it alongside Neanderthals, Denisovans andHomo floresiensis which are known to have thrived in Asia and Europe. Researchers have named the Taiwan individual Penghu 1 as the fossil was discovered by fishermen in the Penghu River, according to Discovery News.
"Here we describe a newly discovered archaic Homo mandible from Taiwan (Penghu 1), which further increases the diversity of Pleistocene Asian hominins. Penghu 1 revealed an unexpectedly late survival (younger than 450 but most likely 190-10 thousand years ago) of robust, apparently primitive dentognathic morphology in the periphery of the continent, which is unknown among the penecontemporaneous fossil records from other regions of Asia except for the mid-Middle Pleistocene Homo from Hexian, Eastern China," researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers have established that the jaw does not belong to modern humans but have not ruled out the possibility that it could belong to a descendant of Homo erectus which is said to have lived between 1.9 million years and 143,000 years ago.
"Such patterns of geographic trait distribution cannot be simply explained by clinal geographic variation of Homo erectus between northern China and Java, and suggests survival of multiple evolutionary lineages among archaic hominins before the arrival of modern humans in the region," researchers further wrote.
