700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative
Michael Greshko: 700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative: "Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?...
...The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino's limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino's ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.... The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old....
“It's really, really exciting—it's now becoming increasingly clear that ancient forms of hominins were able to make significant deep-sea crossings,” says Adam Brumm.... The list of possible toolmakers includes the Denisovans, a ghost lineage of hominins known from DNA and a handful of Siberian fossils. The leading candidate, though, is the early hominin Homo erectus, since it definitely made its way into southeast Asia. The Indonesian island of Java has H. erectus fossils that are more than 700,000 years old. Ingicco's team suggests that the butchers may have been Luzon's version of H. floresiensis, which may have descended from a population of H. erectus that ended up on Flores. Over millennia, the H. erectus there may have evolved to live efficiently on a predator-free island, shrinking in a process called island dwarfism...
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