Patagonian monsters: April 2019

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Yeti footprints?

News reports published today inform that the Indian Army has found footprints of the mythical Yeti in the snow.

The Indian Army communicated their finding in a Tweet (read it here) has some photos and the following text:

" For the first time, an #IndianArmy Moutaineering Expedition Team has sited Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast 'Yeti' measuring 32x15 inches close to Makalu Base Camp on 09 April 2019. This elusive snowman has only been sighted at Makalu-Barun National Park in the past."

Photo taken by the Indian Army on April 9, 2019, Indian men measure large foot prints in the snow, sighted by the Indian Army, near the Makalu Base Camp in the North-Eastern Himalayas. (HANDOUT / AFP/Getty Images).

This is a video from The Economic Times.

It is probably the tracks of some bear or snow leopard.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Recent interbreeding with Denisovans in New Guinea

New Scientist published an interesting article which suggests that modern humans mixed with Denisovans twice, that is, they had sex with two separate groups of Denisovans.

The first admixture took place some 50,000 years ago but... a second event happened in the island of New Guinea far more recently: some 15,000 years ago.

So Denisovans had reached this island and when humans got there, well, they did what people usually do... shared body fluids and admixed.

What we need now, is to know who were these Denisovans, where did they come from, what were they like...

New species of Homo in Asia!

A paper published in Nature (A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines Florent Detroi et al., Naturevolume 568, pages181–186, 2019) today, tells us the following:

A hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007 in Callao Cave (Northern Luzon, the Philippines) and dated to 67 thousand years ago provided the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines. Analysis of this foot bone suggested that it belonged to the genus Homo, but to which species was unclear. Here we report the discovery of twelve additional hominin elements that represent at least three individuals that were found in the same stratigraphic layer of Callao Cave as the previously discovered metatarsal. These specimens display a combination of primitive and derived morphological features that is different from the combination of features found in other species in the genus Homo (including Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens) and warrants their attribution to a new species, which we name Homo luzonensis. The presence of another and previously unknown hominin species east of the Wallace Line during the Late Pleistocene epoch underscores the importance of island Southeast Asia in the evolution of the genus Homo.

So here we have humans living in the Philippines 67 kya that differ from both Homo sapiens and the minute H Floresiensis.

It has a mosaic of archaic and modern features which highlights the presence of a wide diversity of hominins in Asia prior to the "Out of Africa" event. This surely combines Denisovan, Homo erectus and, perhaps H. habilis traits.

Asia will come up with plenty of surprises in the coming years, maybe they will debunk the Out of Africa theory...

This finding took place in the Callao Cave, which we reported in a previous post: Hominins in the Philippines 709,000 years ago: watercraft?

Let's wait for more discoveries.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Our 10th year blogging!

This August, we will celebrate our 10th anniversary blogging on "Patagonian Monsters" and the early peopling of America!

As I (and my wife, my mom and my granddaughter say: "Time flies").

And yes, I must admit that time flies by!, Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70 BC – 19 BC, who only lived to be 51 years old) put it very clearly: "Time flies never to be recalled".

So let's seize the day, in a Carpe Diem spirit and ponder upon our brief moment in eternity, our flash in the vastness of time.

After all, what is the life span of a human being (70 - 90 years) in the life of our universe (14 Billion years and counting)?

Nothing! we are gone in a flash, we appear from nothing, live and are gone in a breeze, to rest eternally.

The Verve in "Bitter sweet symphony, was rather blunt:
"Cause it's a bittersweet symphony this life
Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die."

I disagree with The Verve, I am not a slave to money, and find delight in the small things of life (Note to self: the hidden pleasures of life are to be found in the "small" moments, not in things... experiences, fleeting moments of bliss far surpass the crass delights of material joy, of buying, having, owning...)

So, having said that, and looking back at these ten years, I must say that it has been an honor and also a great pleasure to post here over the past ten years, and I will continue doing so because I really enjoy it.

Thank you for putting up with me! And, for another 10 -or 20? - more years.

Austin

Some Odd teeth in China

A paper (Late Middle Pleistocene hominin teeth from Tongzi, southern China, by Song Xinga, María Martinon-Torres and Jose MariaBermudez de Castro) reported that some teeth roughly 200,000-years-old found in the Yanhui cave in China, which were originally thought to belong to Homo erectus, may belong to some other hominin.

They have a mix of modern and archaic traits, which lack some characteristic features of H. erectus, but don't belong to Neanderthals either!

Since modern H. sapiens was still in Africa at that time, these teeth (because they are large) may have belonged to the mysterious Denisovan group.

Expect some surprising findings to come out of China in the coming years. Asia was teeming with "humans" long before the purported "out of Africa" migration took place. It may be the cradle of humankind.

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