Longlin Cave, China

Archaic-modern human hybrids at the end of the ice age?  (11,500 years?)

 (originally posted 8/4/2020)

Today’s site from 10,000 years ago is pretty controversial and might just be due to a dating error.  But they found a skull in 1979 in Longlin Cave in south west China that in 2012 was radiocarbon dated to 11,500 years ago that they suspect is the result of hybridization between modern humans and a more archaic type of humans.  They say this because some of it features don’t look modern, but others do.  The most likely archaic human is the Red Deer Cave People, who themselves resemble a mix between Neanderthal and Homo Erectus.  Heck, we don’t really know what Denisovans looked like, so maybe they looked like them?  The bones for these people were found in a cave in a neighboring province and dated to about 12.6 to 14.3 thousand years ago.  Red ochre was found painted on one of their thigh bones, and it appeared to have been broken open in such a way as to get to the marrow.  This could be interpreted as ritual cannibalism, or maybe modern humans had dined on them.  If the skull in the Longlin Cave really was a hybrid between modern humans and these people, then they would have mated with them as well.  Of course, the most shocking part of this all was that it was dated so late.  Other archaic humans are though to have gone extinct or absorbed completely into modern human populations long before this.  For example, Neanderthals would have ceased to exist as a distinct species 40,000 years ago.  Could another type of human have survived right up until the end of the last ice age?  Could they have remained isolated from the rest of humanity for so long and delay their fate?  They suspect that the Red Deer People could have survived to that day so as to produce a hybrid, or there was a population of modern humans who had interbred with these archaic people, but then retained some of their archaic features for long times due to isolation from the rest of humanity.

The skull does not resemble modern East Asians very much, so they doubt that they are ancestors to modern Asians in the way that Denisovans are or Neanderthals are to Europeans.  One alternate possibility is that these are modern humans, but in the past, modern humans were more diverse, and they lost that diversity and skull features over time.  The scientists lament how they have not been able to obtain DNA samples from the bones in order to figure out where they fit in the family tree of humanity.  

In all likelihood though, we’re going to find out that this mystery can just be chalked up to inaccurate dating.  When they first discovered the “Hobbit” species of small humans in 2003 in Indonesia, they thought they had survived to an extremely recent time as well, as recent as 12,000 years ago.  However, after dating their materials better, they found that the bones they had found were around 50,000 years old, which would have been about the time they first encountered modern humans.  Last year, a paper was published that provided an alternative date for the Red Deer Cave people that was inconsistant with such a late date.  I couldn’t actually read the full article to see how old they thought they were, but it was probably closer to 50,000 years ago than 12,600 years ago.  They cautioned that water in many humid caves such as those in China might cause the radio carbon dates to become skewed.  Anyone dating in such a cave would have to be extra careful and come up with a date more than one way to be sure.  I’m not sure if the Red Deer Cave dates have been officially debunked though, just questioned.  I also haven’t seen any new papers that call into question the date of the Longlin Cave skull specifically, but have a feeling it’s only a matter of time.  But hey, until that happens, there’s always a chance there really could have been another type of human that survived to the end of the ice age.  Even if it does turn up to be bogus, it’s still always fun to ponder if some other archaic human had managed to survive that long, isolated, somewhere in this great big world of ours, just waiting to be discovered.  Or even into the modern age - like Big Foot!