Khoisan and their epicanthic fold

As promised in my previous post, I decided to explore the similar eye-shape in Khoisan Africans and East-South Asians. The former are said to be the "oldest", most diverse group of humans, that split from the original Homo sapiens group and remained isolated in Southern Africa for ovre 150,000 years. Yet they have some particular features not found in other African groups, but common in Eurasia (pale pigmented skin, and a typical Asian feature in their eyes, the epicanthic fold).

Few papers on eye-shape genes

Unexpectedly, even though tens of thousands of papers have been published on genes and their effect on human health and features, there are just a handful dealing with the epicanthic fold, and none of them have identified the genes originating it.

I have found comments on the Internet stating that it evolved independently in Africa and in Asia. That is is the result of convergent evolution (like the one that shaped mammal dolphins, fish sharks, and reptilian ichtyosaurs, or mammalian bats, birds and flying pterodactyl reptiles) where bodies are shaped to forms that are best adapted to their environments. But no in-depth analysis of genes producing these eye-shapes.

Khoisan people.

I wonder if the lack of publications is due to some unconscious bias, where scientists don't want to look into an Asian feature found in a small allegedly "ancestral" population, a fact that seems to go against the established Out of Africa origin of humans.

Why is it prevalent among the "ancient" (150 ky old) Khoisan in southern Africa, and the modern Out of Africa humans in Eastern Asia (40 ky old) and South East Asia?

Its presence elsewhere is due to migrations from Asia, moving into northern Europe, America and Polynesia.

Epicanthal Folds

The inner corner of the eye, or medial canthus has a distinct appearance in some human populations. It is quite frequent among East Asians, and also among Tibetans, Central Asians, South East Asians, American Natives, and even North European groups with ancient Asian origins, like the Sami and Finish people. Interestingly, the Khoisan people also have this feature. The map below shows its global distribution (but the prevalence is lower in America, Europe and South Asia, highest in South Africa and East Asia (Source). The map also provides some genetics to the different regions, but since it came from Reddit, and I haven't found research to back it, I am doubtful. It mixes mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups with the EDAR variant.

One paper (Peng et al., 2015) studied Uyghur people, and found that EDAR V370A may be related to the fold, but it only seemed to be statistically significant for the left eye fold, but not for the right one. The authors also note that EDAR V370 plays a role in embryonic development and therefore affects ectodermal-derived features like teeth and face shape, hair thickness, sweat glands, etc. I have posted about the EDAR gene and the peopling of America. Below is the data from this paper:

The Fold itself

What is the Epicanthal fold: it is a skin fold on the upper eyelid with an oblique or vertical alignment that covers the medial canthus (inner corner) and gives the eye a distinct external appearance. It has no effect on the zize of shape of the eye itself, but it makes it appear as almond shape, more "slanted" and smaller.

"The genetic basis for epicanthus is not well known" (Source), but I came across some interesting facts about the development of this feature: all human embryos: "in all races during foetal life" (Source). Most babies lose them by the time of birth, but other babies are born "with epicanthic folds, In some people the folds are retained into adulthood, while in some people they reduce at an early age... and often grow out of it as the bridge of their nose grows" (Source).

The lower nose bridge a common feature in Asians and Khoisan people influences the muscles on their faces, and the tensions produced by them which may be one of the causes of these folds.

" It is normally most prominent during childhood. As the bridge of the nose gains more height with age, it pulls the skin away from the eye, diminishing and reshaping the fold." Source

Kwon and Nguyen, 2015, in a paper on epicanthic eyes, confirm the uncertain origin of this trait: "the developmental mechanism of Asian epicanthus has not been defined clearly" and attribute the eye shape to the thickening of a muscle (the preseptal orbicularis oculi muscle) caused by an environmental factors such as ultraviolet radiation, cold weather, dust in the air leading to "excessive frowning, and repeated excessive frowning can induce orbicularis muscle hypertrophy ... There would be a strong repeated contraction of upper orbicularis muscle and depressor supercilii muscle in the Asian eyelid from frowning. Excessive muscle contraction would be an unavoidable action in the protection of eyes from environmental harshness. Hence, environmental adaptation would be a basic cause for the formation of the epicanthus"

Those born with this trait would have been better adapted in these harsh enviornments, and the feature could have been fixed in these populations by natural selection. As the Khoisan live in the Kalahari desert, dust there could have selected for this variant. However, why is it not present among people living in the Sahara or in Saudi Arabia, also dusty, desertic, UV-radiated regions?

Asia, Africa and human origins

Interestingly, Yuan, 2019 proposing an Out of Asia and Into Africa theory, suggests an Asian origin for the distinct features of the Khoisan: "Fossils or traits indicating AMH [Anatomically Modern Humans] migration from East Asia into Africa or Europe have been noted before. First, native Africans such as Khoisans are well known to have certain East Asian features such as shoveling teeth, epicanthic fold, and lighter skins"

But how did this trait, so common in Asia reach South Africa and leave no traces in the intermediate regions (Iran, Middle East, South Asia, Caucasus, North Africa, Central Africa, Western Africa)?

Maybe the answer lies in the findings of a paper published by Krishna R Veeramah et al., 2001: the Khosian or people linked to them once occupied a much larger territory:

"Conventional thinking has tended toward a model where KhoeSan initially diverged from the ancestors of all other AMH groups and remained relatively isolated. However, the KhoeSan demonstrate deep genetic connections with other click-speaking peoples in Tanzania (Henn et al. 2011), with proposed time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) estimates ranging from 35 to 110 kya (Chen et al. 2000; Knight et al. 2003; Gonder et al. 2007; Tishkoff et al. 2007). In addition, a genetic link with contemporary Ethiopian populations has also been proposed (Cruciani et al. 2002; Salas et al. 2002; Semino et al. 2002). This, along with linguistic evidence, suggests that the KhoeSan territory once covered a much larger area, extending further northwest toward the Great Rift Valley (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Blench 2006; Scheinfeldt et al. 2010). Recent autosomal-based analyses show a tendency for KhoeSan and Pygmies to cluster together and away from other sub-Saharan Africans (Zhivotovsky et al. 2003; Tishkoff et al. 2009; Sikora et al. 2011), leading to the hypothesis that the ancestors of these two populations may have once formed a proto-KhoeSan–Pygmy hunter-gatherer group that was geographically widespread before being encroached upon by expanding agricultural populations."

If their homeland reached further north, it is possible that a migration from Asia could have reached Eastern Africa and admixed with the ancestors of modern Khoisan. Then, other African groups, with archaic admixture advanced and pushed them into their current territory, closing the door for furhter mixing. These dark-skinned Africans erased the ancestral San people in East Africa.

Perhaps the Hadza and Sandawe people from Tanzania are a relict of the old San click-speaking people of East Africa

The EDAR gene mentioned further up also influences the shape of teeth, and in this, the teeth of Homo erectus and modern East Asians share the same shape! Research on the EDAR 1540C variant states that "the continuity of shovel-shaped incisors between Homo erectus and modern humans in East Asia was a rationale for the multiregional evolution theory of modern humans, although this theory is not generally supported at present" (Kimura et al., 2009).

So, a bolder alternative to its distribution could be that the ancestral origin is found among the Homo erectus, who originated in Asia, back-migrated into Asia and passed it on to the Khoisan people, with their click language. It entered the continent along a southern Asian route, leaving no trace in Southwestern Asia or North Africa. They entered Africa from the East, settling there, later modern humans picked it up from these erectus in China and in Africa, leading to its current distribution.

Let's see what further research brings.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

San (Khoisan) and Europeans

Following my previous post on similarities between San people in southern South Africa, and Europeans, I read a paper about the San (Khoisan) and their "antiquity". It reports them as an ancient population that retained a large effective population while that of other groups fell (i.e. other Africans, Europeans, Asians, and the Out of Africa migrants).

The paper published in Nature in 2014 by Kim et al., (Khoisan hunter-gatherers have been the largest population throughout most of modern-human demographic history). The image below shows how Ne (effective population) evolves over time (oldest to the right), for San, African Yoruba, Europeans, and Asians. As you can see all groups (actually, the ancestors leading to each of these populations) have similar population sizes till 100,000 years ago when a dramatic drop in population sizes occurs. I don't understand how they obtained Ne values for hominin populations 2 to 4 million years ago, this was the days of Australopiths and probably Homo habilis.

Effective population sizes for San, Africans, Asians and Europeans. Fig. 3 a in Kim et al., 2014

This drop in effective population size is attributed to climate changes within Africa. The paper includes a series of maps as Fig. 12 in its Supplementary Material to explain the process. They can be seen below:

Modern humans originated in Africa (a), blue circle in South Africa seems to imply an origin there, though the paper does not specify the location. Then these people spread north (b), the orange oval marks the new territories. Then came the climate change (c) around 150 or 100 kya. Drought in western and central Africa hit the humans there in central, western, and eastern Africa, but spared the San people in the southern part of Africa. This coincided with a fragmented population (structured) with isolated groups that did not interact with each other (see the different dots and colors on the map, marking these groups). Populations declined central and western Africa, and when the ancestors of Non-Africans (green arrows) (d) migrated Out of Africa (OOA), they carried this lower Ne, and it dwindled even more due to bottlenecks and founder effects as they advanced into Eurasia. The San, however, kept their population intact.

The authors reconstruction of this period is summarized as follows: "After the earliest split, between the ancestral Khoisan and non-Khoisan populations ~100–150 kyr ago, the ancestral Khoisan population maintained their high genetic diversity, while the effective population size of the non-Khoisan continued to decline for 30~120 kyr ago and lost more than half of its diversity. The ‘Out of Africa’ migration ~40–60 kyr ago accounts for the observed population split between African and non-African populations, and the subsequent smaller effective population size of non-Africans compared with non-Khoisan Africans."

Comments

However, and interestingly, as pointed out in my previous post, the San and Europeans share several unique allele variants that are ancestral (found also in Neanderthals and Denisovans) whcih confer lighter pigmented skin than that found among the remaining Africans and also South Asians and Australo-Melanesians, who carry a later (derived) mutation for darker pigmentation.

How does this similarity between a specific OOA group and San people tie in with the evolution and migration sproposed by Kim et al.?

Not well. We would have to imagine a group that split from the San, moved north, lived in isolation in Central Africa, then survived the climate crisis there, moved north, left Africa, surviving the founder effect, bottlenecks and genetic drift, established themselves in Europe and somehow managed to keep their skin-color alleles intact. While all the other groups in Africa mutated and adopted a dark skin set of alleles. Too complex to be the explanation.

The San (Khoisan or bushmen) have always intrigued me since the 1980s movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy", I was taken aback by their pale skin and oriental factions. So different from the usual African features. People living in the deserts of Namibia with a hunter-gatherer culture in the 20th century! I have never found a paper explaining their similarity with East Asians. I will explore this strange trait in a coming post.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

A paper on skin pigmentation: San & Europeans share light skin alleles

I came across a recent paper published in Science in 2017 by Crawford et al., Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations, which holds some interesting facts about skin color genetics and when the dark and pale variants arose.

I have posted in the past about light skin pigmentation in Amerindians and Neanderthal skin color, but this post will look into light skin alleles shared by the San people of Africa and modern Europeans.

Skin color genes are ancient

When it comments on how skin pigmentation evolved in modern humans, the paper points out that there is a wide variability within Africa, from the most pale group (the San in southern Africa) to the East African people of the Nilo Saharian region, who aret the darkest. It correctly states that the genes causing both dark and light skin color evolved before our Homo sapiens species appeared around 300,000 years ago (300 ky).

Surprisingly, the paper finds that "the ancestral allele is associated with light pigmentation in about half of the predicted causal SNPs; Neandertal and Denisovan genome sequences, which diverged from modern human sequences 804 ka, contain the ancestral allele at all loci." So, our closest relatives in evolutionary terms carried this ancestral white-skinned allele with them. However, the paper tends to downplay this fact, and it says something which sounds the opposite: "These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that darker pigmentation is a derived trait that originated in the genus Homo within the past ~2 million years (My) after human ancestors lost most of their protective body hair" and then, like an afterthought mentions the paler tint of Neanderthals and Denisovans: "... although these ancestral hominins may have been moderately, rather than darkly, pigmented. Moreover, it appears that both light and dark pigmentation have continued to evolve over hominid history."

Shared genes between dark pigmented Africans and Australo-Melanesians

It mentions something I hadn't read before (I was always surprised by the similarity in the dark tint of pigmentation in Melanesians, Australian Aboriginal people, Andamenese islanders and Africans): they share a common genetic origin, and could be identical by descent (IBD). The paper says that "Individuals from South Asia and Australo-Melanesia share variants associated with dark pigmentation at MFSD12, DDB1/TMEM138, OCA2, and HERC2 that are identical by descent from Africans. This raises the possibility that other phenotypes shared between Africans and some South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations may also be due to genetic variants identical by descent from African populations rather than convergent evolution."

It is indeed interesting to note that the bottleneck and founder effects and loss of diversity among the Out of Africa migration population managed to carry, intact, these alleles across Southern Asia, into Australia and Melanesia, while another group managed to carry the white, paler skin alleles.

A light pigmentation variant shared by San and Europeans

There is a variant at SNP rs1800404 within OCA2, that in its ancestral form (with a cytosine base or "C") is found in dark skinned East Asians, most Africans and Australians and Melanesians. The derived variant with a Thymine base or "T", is found in Europeans and the pruportedly most ancestral human beings, the San from southern Afirca! (found among these two groups in frequencies of over 70%). The split is ancient: " Coalescent analysis indicates that the TMRCA of all lineages is 1.7 Ma (95% CI, 1.5 to 2.0 Ma), and the TMRCA of lineages containing the derived (T) allele is 629 ka (95% CI, 426 to 848 ka)"

The tree shown above has two branches with the African one deeper (older) and shorter ones for most modern populations. Note the Oceanians and South Asians are on the African branch.

The allele shared by San and Europeans dates back approximately to the time Neanderthals and Denisovans split from the Modern human lineage.

Another region that acts upon skin color is HERC2, where SNP rs6497271 comes in an ancestral A variant (with an adenine base) providing dark pigmentation to Australo-Melanesians and Africans (identical in both groups, suggesting an identity by descent), and the derived base, (G) or guanine which is linked to lighter skin pigmentation and found in Europeans, and, yes, in the San people. This one is also old, dating back to "921 ka (95% CI, 703 ka to 1.2 Ma)".

If the dark "A" variant is IBD, the pale "G" one should also be IBD, and this one is possibly older than the Denisovan-Neanderthal / Human split as it is 921,000 years old.

The tree (above) show its distribution globally, with two branches the dark skin variant seems to have longer branches making it look more ancestral than the other, pale skin variants. I don't see the link between Africans and Australo-Melanesians in this tree, as mentioned by the authors.

How did Europeans and San people get to share this variant and the other OCA2 variant, while all the Africans living between both groups have the derived dark pigmentation variants? Note that there is 6,600 km (4,100 miles) between the southernmost tip of Europe in Greece and the San homeland in Botswana/Namibia.

We can imagine different alternatives to explain this: (1) A small population of modern humans split, one headed north into Europe, the other was displaced south into the southern tip of Africa. Between them, a mutation appeared, providing dark pigmentation for people living in the tropical regions of Africa, with benefits like UV protection, etc. (the paper hints that dark skin may have positive effects on other bodily functions: "...some of the pigmentation-associated variants identified here may be maintained because of pleiotropic effects on other aspects of human physiology."

Another option (2) is that pale pigmentation was prevalent among the archaic population that evolved into Neanderthal-Denisovan-Humans and moved with them across Eurasia but a later darker variant appeared in Africa and became predominant there, displacing the pale skin to the southern tip of Africa (San), and migrating out of Africa in a sub-population of modern humans that peopled South Asia and Australia-Melanesia (PNG, Aboriginals, Negrito, Andamanese people). Later overlaid by a wave of paler humans in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and North India. Did the Europeans get pale skin from admixing with Neanderthals, and Asians from Denisovans?

(3) Prehaps ancient archaics had the darker pigmentation alleles, and a separate archaic group was lighter colored, the former remained in Africa (H. habilis), the latter moved into Eurasia (H. erectus?). Modern humans evolved in Asia, starting with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and back-migrated into Africa where admixture with archaics in Africa led to a darkening currently observed there. The san, part of the wave of migrants were displaced and isolated, retaining the original alleles. However, the dark skinned south Asians and Melanesians can't be accounted for with this model. Perhaps there was an Out of Africa migration along coastal South Asia into Melanesia? Or an ancient migration of superarchaics into Asia that mingled there with later populations?

In any case, I find it interesting that contemporary Europeans, who are deemed to be very recent, and the San people, supposedly the oldest intact group of humans, that split from the rest of us over 150,000 years ago, share the same light-skin pigmentation alleles. This oddity indicates that there is something amiss with our current idea of human origins and dispersal.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

David Reich's take on the Y population and Australasians

The mysterious and ancient ghost population known as "Y" Population mentioned in yesterday's post (and in several other posts over the past years) was explored in depth by Harvard geneticist, David Reich in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past 🔓.

In Chapter 7 (starts on p. 155), dedicated to the original ancestors of the Native Americans, Reich explains the theories and timing of the peopling of America based on current archaeological and genetic data.

Reich tells how the one wave peopled South America mutated over the years, and now we believe that at least four separate migrations led to the current makeup of Native Americans. Of relevance is the section starting on p. 176 that looks into the Y population.

The basics are the following: Walter Neves was the first to propose (see post) base on skull morphology, that ancient Brazilian paleoindians, like those found in Lagoa Santa were very similar to those of Australian aboriginals and Melanesians from Papua New Guinea.

Fig 21 in Reich's book, original caption reads: Despite extraordinary geographic distance, populations in the Amazon share ancestry with Australians, New Guineans, and Andamanese to a greater extent than with other Eurasians. This may reflect an early movement of humans into the Americas from a source population that is no longer substantially represented in northeast Asia.

This was very controversial, and opposed by the mainstream anthropologists. However, Pontus Skoglund investigated this possibility and after looking into the genetics of different native people, "found two Native American populations, both from the Amazon region of Brazil, that are more closely related to Australasians than to other world populations... Skoglund found weaker signals of genetic affinity to Australasians, but still probably real, in other Native American populations ringing the Amazon basin. He estimated that the proportion of ancient ancestry in these populations was small—1 to 6 percent—with the rest being consistent with First American ancestry."

This pattern appeared not only in Skoglund's data (by the way, Skoglund was working with Reich as a postdoctoral student), but in other data sets collected by other scientists. Furthermore, they also showed that it wasn't a recent admixture with people from Australia or Papua New Guinea, nor the result of Polynesians carrying these alleles across the Pacific to America.

The remarkable findings are that:

• Similar yet not closely related: "while Amazonians had their strongest affinity to indigenous people from Australia, New Guinea, and the Andaman Islands (compared to East Asians as a baseline), they were not particularly close to any of them"
• It was highest among the Suruí, Karitiana, and Xavante groups, and almost absent elsewhere: "We found little or no Population Y ancestry in Mesoamerica or in South Americans to the west of the high Andes. We also did not detect Population Y ancestry in the almost thirteen-thousand-year old genome of the Clovis culture infant from the northern United States, or in present-day Algonquin speakers from Canada. The Population Y geographic distribution is largely limited to Amazonia, providing yet more evidence for an ancient origin" Reich attributes this limited distribution to an "original pioneering population that was once more broadly distributed and was then marginalized by the expansion of other groups."
• Two groups of Native Americans with skulls similar to those of Neves' Paleoindians were tested by other researchers, they were Pericués of Baja California, and Fuegians in Argentina, however, neither group carried the signal of Population Y alleles.

This evidence suggests different population possibilities to Reich: (1) Population Y reached America first, spread across the continent and later, when the "First Americans" (actually, the current ones, but not first, they were second) arrived they displaced and replaced the Population Y people "either completely or only partially, as in Amazonia. Population Y ancestry may have survived better in Amazonia than it did elsewhere because of the relative impenetrability of the Amazonian environment." So, in the Amazons the original Population Y was not razed, but admixed gradually with the newcomers.

The current levels of Population Y ancestry in the Amazonians may be small (~2%), Reich states that the impact of the ghost populations should not be dismissed. Reich proposes a second theory (2) in which he supposes that the Population Y people as they walked across Asia and Siberia into "northern North America where the ancestors of First Americans were also living. It is likely that Population Y was already mixed with large amounts of First American–related ancestry when it started expanding into South America. If so, then the ancestry derived from a lineage related to southern Asians is only a kind of “tracer dye” for Population Y ancestry—like the heavy metals injected into patients’ veins in hospitals to track the paths of their blood vessels in a CT scan. Our estimate of around 2 percent Population Y ancestry in the Suruí is based on the assumption that Population Y traversed the entirety of Northeast Asia and America without mixing with other people it encountered. If we allow for the likelihood that there was mixture with populations related to First Americans on the way, the proportion of Population Y in the Suruí could be as high as 85 percent and still produce the observed statistical evidence of relatedness to Australasians. If the true proportion is even a fraction of this, then the story of First Americans expanding into virgin territory is profoundly misleading. Instead, we need to think in terms of an expansion of a highly substructured founding population of the Americas. The history and timing of the arrival of Population Y in the Americas is likely to be resolved only with recovery of ancient DNA from skeletons with Population Y ancestry."

So, in this second scenario, the Y Population isn't the original one, instead it was part of the First People reaching America, in a very highly structured population which somehow (Reich does not explain the mechanism though!) had already admixed with other Native groups, yet did not leave any signal in North America or Central America, or anwyhere other than the Amazon region.

I agree that further studies are needed, and finding Population Y remains will be of capital intererst, but also, we need a theory proposing a clear mechanism, other than Bottlenecks and genetic drift, to explain how the Population Y signal was erased, and is absent among present day Amerindians all across America —except for these three Amazonian groups.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Denisovan admixture within America?

Last may I published a brief post about a paper by Castro e Silva et al., (2026). The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10406-w. The paper is an in-depth study of South American natives' genetics, the three waves that peopled the subcontinent, and the "remarkable allele sharing with Australasian populations, probably originating from an ancient admixture event and partly maintained by selection for more than 10,000 years." It attributes this permanence across ten millennia because this admixture was positively selected for due to benefits these alleles provided to those carrying them.

Archaic Introgression

I re-read the article and took note of the part that says that the Australasian signal is not the result of an archaic introgression, which means that Denisovans didn't share these same genes with Oceanian and American natives, there were different groups admixing with each population. The paper states: "Furthermore, we identified candidate regions of adaptive archaic introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans that contribute to functions related to immunity, metabolism and epidermal integrity, thereby reinforcing the role of archaic alleles in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of non-African populations. Importantly, our data indicate minimal overlap between genomic regions with Australasian affinity and those introgressed from archaic hominins, supporting the interpretation that these signals represent distinct evolutionary phenomena."

Australasian signal

The Australasian signal in Amerindians is very very peculiar, it has a high prevalence in some groups that live in the Southwestern Amazon region and Chaco (these groups are the Awajún, Ayoreo, Guarani, Karitiana, Sirionó, Suruí, and Tsimané). This is known as the introgression from a "Y" population, or Ypykuéra (a Tupi word meaning "ancestor") which is a "ghost lineage" of ancient Amerindians with a high Australasian genetic content.

The paper confirms that the distribution of Australasian "alleles" is not uniform, it shows a "partially discontinuous spatiotemporal pattern" which suggests, according to the authors that "this ancestry was present during the initial peopling of America." It is also very ancient because the paper finds that Amerindians "diverged from other continental groups between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago."

The paper states that isolation of these Amazonian groups that carry the highest frequencies of these introgressed alleles and their inbreeding and small population sizes are all factors that led them to have such a high prevalence of them. However, I wonder if another factor was at play: Denisovans lived in that region and encountered humans there, admixing in that area with them. After all it is a kind of cul-de-sac in the Amazonian rainforest nowadays, why wouldn't it have been one for the Denisovans? They also seem to have thrived in the jungles of Indonesia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia.

The comparison between different groups within America, outside of America, and archaics, didn't detect any "correlation... between Australasian and Neanderthal... or Denisovan affinity... By contrast, Neanderthal and Denisovan affinities were strongly correlated... consistent with homogeneous archaic ancestry in the founding populations."

This is interesting because the Australasian signal is independent from the two archaic introgressions. This suggests that the Denisovans and Neanderthals that admixed with the first Amerindians were different from those who admixed with Australasians (including the Onge people and the Hòabìnhian people from Laos).

The authors wondered if the Australasian-Amerindian similarity was due to "shared archaic ancestry" but when the checked the introgression from Denisovans and Neanderthals in both groups, they found a "minimal overlap of 0.4%, corresponding to 11 genes/genomic regions... This minimal overlap indicates that the Ypykuéra ancestry is unlikely to have been derived from a known archaic hominin." (This is not clear, what do they mean by "a known archaic hominin"?)

The paper did find a "shared ancestry component between Indigenous Americans and Australasians that extends deep into the past." So this shared ancestry probably came from a similar modern human group, yet, as mentioned further up, the ancestors of the Amerindians split from other H. sapiens 15 to 70,000 years ago. I favor the older date. But, intriguingly, these people did not admix with the same Denisovans or Neanderthals that the Australasians bred with!

This could be explained by a split in this basal Homo sapiens: one group went into Australasia and admixed there with a group of Denisovans, the other headed north into East Asia mixing with other Denisovans, and eventually reached America. However, why is there no presence of other East Asian signals in Amerindians? This leads to a second alternative: the admixture event between Denisovans and the modern human ancestors of Amerindians took place inside America?

The map below outlines this possibility, with the Denisovans splitting from the Neanderthals somewhere in the South Caucasus, and moving into East Asia along different routes, a northern one to Altai, and then Tibet and East Asia, another along South Asia, and South East Asia into the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Another hypothetical route could have led them across Siberia into America. Their last stand was in the Tropical Amazon region. They seemed to thrive in all types of climate, from icy siberia and Altai, to the highlands of Tibet, and the jungles of Sundaland and Sahul. America offers all of them: Cold Alaska, Canada and Northern USA, Patagonia, high mountains and plateaus in Bolivia and Peru, as well as along the Andes in Chile and Argentina, and of course the Jungles east of the Andes from Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Oceanians & Denisovans, a new paper

A paper published in Science last week reported that Near Oceanians, that is, people living in the islands close to Papua New Guinea in Melanesia (New Britain, New Ireland, Bouganville, etc.) and the Solomon Islands, mixed with three different types of Denisovans and still carry their genes nowadays because they play a role in the adaptability and survival of these people.

This is the paper: Patrick F. Reilly, Stephen Rong, Daniela Tejada-Martinez, Samantha L. Miller, Audrey Tjahjadi, Chang Liu, Jared Akers, Alysa Pomer, Margaret E. Prentice, D. Andrew Merriwether, Françoise R. Friedlaender, George Koki, Jonathan S. Friedlaender, Steven K. Reilly, Serena Tucci. Long-term isolation and archaic introgression shape functional genetic variation in Near Oceania. Science, 2026; 392 (6803) DOI: 10.1126/science.adr6749

The authors state that they found "previously unidentified archaic sequence and three times more Denisovan sequence than previous studies... We uncovered evidence for introgression from three Denisovan-like groups into the ancestors of Near Oceanians, revealing a new twist on our interactions with archaic hominins." The Denisovan introgressions impact on genes that affect "TRPS1, a skeletal development gene previously found under selection in central African rainforest hunter-gatherers and highland Ecuadorians", and also genes invovled in immune system pathways.

The paper points out that bottlenecks and subsequent genetic drift, and isolation of the populations in the region have shaped their genetics, causing wide differences between different groups.

Regarding the Denisovan introgression, this study "found that Oceanic genomes carry ∼2.5-fold more archaic introgressed sequence from all origins per individual than European genomes... and 14-fold more Denisovan sequence per individual than East Asian genomes."

But, the distribution of Denisovan genes was not uniform, to the contrary, it varied "by almost twofold from the New Guinean Sepik and Goroka groups to New Britain’s Nakanai and the Polynesian outlier groups of Bellona and Rennell... Sepik individuals harbored the most Denisovan introgression, 25 times more than East Asians... In line with prior work, we found that the genomic proportion of Denisovan introgression in Island Southeast Asian and Near Oceanic groups increased with greater shared ancestry with New Guineans, with the Philippine Agta as the sole exception" (the Agta people carry a very high proportion of Denisovan genes with a very low New Guinean shared ancestry, perhaps an indication of admixture within the Philippines).

Neanderthal genes

Interestingly, the authors say there is a high level of Neanderthal admixture in this Oceanian population, and refer to table S6 in the Supplementary material. Checking the table I found that the highest Neanderthal content is found in the Surui people of the Amazonian region in South America! the second highest is found in the Santa Cruz islanders of Oceania. See the adapted image below, from Table S6 in this paper:

However, the authors downplay the highest levels of average Neanderthal genetic content found in these Oceanians by using the excuse of bottlenecks. See how the try to minimize or understate this fact: "We found that despite harboring 41% more Neanderthal introgression per individual and having ~45% larger sample size in our dataset, Oceanic genomes had 28% less Neanderthal coverage than Central and South Asian genomes (tables S6 and S7). One possible explanation for reduced archaic coverage is a population bottleneck after admixture, which would also lead to increased homozygosity of archaic tracts. In support of this, we found both elevated homozygosity of archaic tracts and 2.3 to 3.4% less archaic coverage than expected given per-individual levels of introgression in five Oceanic groups with bottleneck signals..."

Denisovans

As you can see, the Denisovan levels are highest in Oceanians, and those living in Island South East Asia, followed far away by Amerindians and East Asians.

The paper states that "Denisovan introgression likely occurred in multiple pulses from multiple distinct Denisovan-like groups... We recapitulated previous findings of introgression from two Denisovan-like groups in East Asians... and found evidence for introgression from three distinct Denisovan-like groups with differing genetic affinity to the Altai Denisovan into almost all sampled Oceanic populations... we show that these signals are more widespread than previously thought, highlighting the complex dynamics of Denisovan admixture with modern humans."

Implications

It is time to look at who the Denisovans were, and also, the route followed by the Neanderthal admixture into both, Oceanians, Amerindians and East Asians. We also need to understand more about the differences between the Densivoan populations. Their evolution in Altai, East Asia, and especially Sahul and Sunda. Their presence in American Native genes is also relevant.

The simple model of humans meet Neanderthals in the Levant on their Out of Africa migration and mingle with Denisovans on their trek along South Asia into East Asia and Oceania is missing something.

Denisovans must have been a thriving group, all along the eastern, central and southern regions of Asia, perhaps also, Oceania when they were met by Homo sapiens, smoke screens arguing bottlenecks, genetic drift, and isolation can't explain away the fact that a group in the Amazon jungle has the highest levels of Denisovan ancestry in the whole world.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The Baked Earth and Cinders of the Miocene Pampas. Man made or natural?

In my recent post on the Diprothomo platensis, I mentioned among the evidence put forward by Argentine archaeologist and paleontologist Florentino Ameghino, the presence of "eoliths" (crude stone tools with an Oldowan appearance), and also, baked earth, which he attributed to the activity of hominins in the Miocene Pampas.

Today's post will look into the baked earth and the different theories about its origin, following, and expanding the interesting work by Pasquali and Tonni, 1998.

Original images of baked earth. Podgorny, 2015

There is a discontinuity in the sedimentary cliffs along the coast of Buenos Aires province, where, as a layer in the Cenozoic terrain there are chunks of spongy-like, dark rock-like fragments 3 to 10 cm in size (2.2 to 4 in), they are called escorias or slag, very similar to volcanic cinder and, accompanying them there are brick-like rocks, in different shapes and sizes which were named tierras cocids or baked earth. They seem to have been formed by applying intense heat to the soil.

Hearths

Florentino Ameghino suggested in 1881 in his work The antiquity of man in the Plata (see p. 240) that they were the outcome of cooking clay in a hearth, man made artifacts, and took them as proof the ancient presence of humans in the age of the megafauna (remains of extinct glyptodonts are found in this layer).

Ameghino asks what do the fragments of baked earth "indicate? Are they the products of the first experiments in ceramic art, or are they simply the result of the action of fire from a hearth lit by humans in the time of the Glyptodon? We believe that the latter supposition is the most plausible, since the humans who inhabited Europe during the later Quaternary period did not know the art of pottery. It would therefore require more than just goodwill to admit the existence of a potter contemporary with the Glyptodon."

Prairie Fire

Later, in 1907 he explained the origin of the baked earth by assuming that human beings deliberately set the dry grasses of the Pampa prairies alight, to make hidden prey escape, and hunt them. The fire spread quickly and the grass turned into ashes fast but the roots, below the surface kept on burning for days, causing the clay in ths soil to acquire a brick-like appearance.

But, Ales Hrdlicka, 1912 who came to Argentina to validate (actually to criticize and erase) Ameghino's theory of the Tertiary man, originating in South America, also studied the baked earth. Read the conclusions of Hrdlicka in his Early man in South America, 1912 Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin which dedicates its Part. IV to the "Tierra Cocida, Scoriae" (p. 45-98).

Original caption reads: "fragments of 'baked earth' with Pampa grass slits (Cortaderia selloana) inside them. The handwritten label by Ameghino states "Lower Chapadmalense. Mouth of de las Brusquitas Creek. F. Ameghino, Septbr 5, 1908". (Ameghino Colection, MACN)". Source

A geologist in his team, Whitman Cross (p.47) conducted controlled burns and found no effect on the soil or subsoil. However, Bailey Willis, part of the same team, inspected a plot of land which had burned recently and found brick-like structures in the soil, and remarked (p. 48) that "There is nothing, however, to connect the burnt earths of the Pampean with man, so far as the occurrences were observed by the writer. Any fire whatever, whether originating in spontaneous combustion, in lightning, or in other natural conditions, independent of man, would have the effect of burning the earth under favorable conditions"

The samples were tested (see Part V, p. 88) and the results showed they had been subjected to temperatures ranging frmo 850°C to 1050°C. The cinders or escoria were found to be non-volcanic, these glassy particles were formed by the melting of certain minerals found in the loess of the Pampas at temperatures above 1050°C.

Much later, in 1971, Césear Cortalezzi proposed that the cinders were formed by chemical reactions in the soil, involving acidity and minerals in the loess.

Volcanic origin

Outes, Delachaux and Bücking had proposed in 1915 a volcanic origin: "General Conclusions. 1 The cellular-structured scoriaceous materials extracted from Monte Hermoso and other deposits are andesitic lava scoria. 2. The compact, red, brown, or grayish materials previously considered "fired earth" are mostly eruptive tuffs."

However, there are no volcanoes in the Pampas, the closest are in the Andes, in Neuquén and Mendoza and Neuquén provinces, over 860 km (530 mi.) west of Monte Hermoso (see the location of this site in Google maps).

The authors overcome this problem by citing Charles Darwin: "Numerous, small, well rounded pebbles of pumice lie scattered both on the plain and sand-hillocks: at Monte Hermoso, on the flat summit of a cliff, I found many of them at a height of 120 feet (angular measurement) above the level of the sea. These pumice pebbles, no doubt, were originally brought down from the Cordillera by the rivers which cross the continent, in the same way as the River Negro anciently brought down, and still brings down, pumice, and as the river Chupat brings down scoriæ: when once delivered at the mouth of a river, they would naturally have travelled along the coasts, and been cast up, during the elevation of the land, at different heights" (Source).

Meteor Impact

Another explanation published by Schulz et al., 1986, in Science (A 3.3-Ma Impact in Argentina and Possible Consequences) suggested an impact origin: a meteor hit the Earth around 3 million years ago. This team had previously studied the craters of a meteorite that struck the ground ~4000 years ago in Río Cuarto, Córdoba, Argentina and found the cinders similar to those found in the baked earths. They found a mineral formed by zircon dioxide which requires a temperature of 1700°C, which is far to high to be produced by burning grasses.

The dating of the cinders led Schulz to believe that a meteor struck the region close to Buenos Aires province 3.3 million years ago, and as there is no visible crater, they conjecture it impacted the now submerged continental shelf close to Miramar or Mar del Plata, in Buenos Aires province (see map below, from their paper). This event was catastrophic: "[the
age of the deposits coincide with a pulselike change in the deep-sea stable isotopic record, reflecting a sudden change in climate and ocean circulation. These coincidences suggest that the impact may have directly induced regional faunal extinctions or triggered broader environmental changes leading to ecosystem collapse in Argentina." If there were Tertiary humans in the area, they would have been wiped out.

Conclusion

Whether we believe or not in the Tertiary man proposed by Ameghino, or in an early peoping of America by non-Homo-sapiens people, the question of baked earth has puzzled scholars for over 140 years. The explanations are interesting, some more formal than others. My preference is the meteoric impact. I don't think that it has a volcanic origin, or that wildfires of prairie grasses caused the baked earth.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

More on Bolas: Eskimo and African bolas

Continuing with my series on Bolas, I found an article written by H. S. Harrison, A bolas-and-hoop game in East Africa, (Man, Vol. XLVII, 170, Dec, 1947 p.153), in which the author wonders if a game played by children in East Africa, called namuziga a is a relict of the original bola used by the paleolithic humans. Recalling Leakey's discovery of stone balls in Kenya, Harrison mentions the game and asks if it is a "degenerate survivor" of the orignal throwing balls.

He includes an image of these bolas from the Horniman Museum and interestingly mentions the use of bolas by Eskimos to hunt birds. Below is the image.

The game is described as follows: "Two sides were chosen, and the object was to win over members of the opposing side, one by one, by dint of skill in throwing and aiming the bolas. This consisted simply of about a yard of string to each end of which was attached a small piece of wood or a dry maize cob-two weights only. The hoop was made of flexible creepers or cane twisted and bound together; this was flung by a boy of one side so as to roll along the ground, and as it rolled each boy of the opposing side, in turn, threw his bolas in an attempt to entangle the hoop and stop its progress. When this was achieved the thrower of the hoop passed from his own side to that of the successful thrower of the bolas, and so the game proceeded, each side taking its turn in rolling the hoop."

So, in fact they are not made of stones, or round projectiles, they are "short cylindrical pieces of light wood, about 3¼ inches long by ¾inch diameter."

Inuit bolas

Regarding the Eskimos, he wrote that "the Eskimo, with their peaceful habits, have only a small bolas, used against flocks of birds."

The Inuit bolas are known as ka-lum-uk-toun, the one pictured in the image had bone and walrus ivory bolas, and dates to the Thule period 300 to 800 years ago.

Harrison concludes that as there are three varieties of bolas, one with two stones, another with three, and finally, the one-stone option (bola perdida), that , "These three types suggest a not too improbable way in which the bolas might have been evolved, possibly in more than one region of the world, if we prefer to think so."

Finally, he notes that "The bolas, like the boomerang, is ill adapted for use in densely wooded areas. Under the more favourable conditions provided by open country in parts of South America, it has been a favoured weapon of hunting peoples." Interestingly, bolas were used initially in the southern tip of South America, abandoned for several millennia, and readopted when the natives adopted the use of the horse for their hunting expeditions. A bola is easier to aim and fling at an escaping rhea (South American ostrich, or ñandú) or a guanaco (a wild relative of the llama), than using a bow and arrow (only the Mongols seem to have mastered the art of aiming straight and riding a horse).

In Patagonia

Compared to these Inuit and African "bolas", the South American ones were much more elaborate.

Alfredo Prieto, 2020 writes about southern Patagonian bolas and provides a timeline: they are first reported in sequences dated to 8500 years BP, and reached their peak in development by 4500 BP with different standard varieties (lemon-shaped, bi-conical, and bi-lobulated, with the typical spherical ones, with an equatorial groove being the most frequent ones).

The "biconical" bolas has finally settled a question I had about some "double cups" found in Patagonia, which I mentioned, and included some pictures of them, in a post back in 2013, where I reported an explanation for their use as symbolic artifacts, which I questioned. It is never to late to learn something new.

They were abandoned around 1500 years BP and bows and arrows were adopted at that time. This hiatus lasted for around 3200 years, until the 1700s, when they started riding horses.

They were made following a series of steps, Prieto provides a description and the following image showing how they were produced.

A granite stone was shaped by percussion and abrasion till it was almost perfectly rounded (upper left images: natural stone, preform) and then polished using a semi-spherical hole in a rock, a groove was then shaped along its midpoint (central top: finishing, grooving). Finally they tied a cord made from twined sinew to the groove. Some balls were painted red, with ochre to make it easier to find them on the ground. Others were polished so that they reflected light and could be seen and retrieved.

Later they were encased in a horse-hide seath as shown in the image a cord was tied around the groove and a seath was sewn around the stone (lower part of the image).

Regarding the Bola perdida it was used to kill opponents, and it was documented as being used to hunt sea lions on the Atlantic coast. The two ball bolas had a similar use, one ball was firmly held in the hand and the other used to pound the skull of the animal or human enemy.

If stones were not available, as in the vast Pampas prairies, the natives could use terracota, compacted clay placed in a seath, or bone.

Prieto notes that bolas were effective: the prey was entangled, immobilized and easy to kill and take back to camp. Using bow and arrow was more complicated: a wounded prey did not die instantly, it fled, had to be tracked, and then carried on foot for long distances back to camp. The Selk'nam (a Tehuelche group in Tierra del Fuego) used bow and arrow into the historic period, they never adopted the horse. Until the early 1900s they continued hunting with bow and arrow. But their environment was different from the dry steppe. They lived in grassy areas and open forests by the Andean foothills.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Bolas - stone balls around the World: Oldowan / Acheulean tools?

In my previous post I mentioned the stone balls, or "bolas" found in Miramar, Argentina, originally claimed to be 2 or even 3 million years old in the early 1900s, they are now believed to be either a hoax, or later, Paleoindian tools. However, genuinre and uncontroversial stone balls h ave been unearthed in the Old World, dating back to Oldowan and Acheulean times, meaning that they are around 1.5 million years old, and were made by Homo erectus or even older ancestral hominins.

Red Crag Stone from Bramford, England

Pictured below, (Red Crag stone. Source) this stone is not a sphere, instead it has an elongated shape, and unlike the other Old World finds, it has been quite controversial.

J. Reid Moir wrote an article about the stone three years after it was found by one of his assistants, by the name of John Baxter. It came from Pliocene sediments at Red Crag, Bramford, a site near Ipswich, in England, UK. The 1929 article titled "A Remarkable Object from Beneath the Red Crag". It was roughly egg shaped. Henri Breuil, who was a witness of the discovery wrote: "While I was staying in Ipswich with my friend J. Reid Moir, we were examining together a drawer of objects from the base of the Red Crag at Bramford, when J. Reid Moir showed me a singular egg-shaped object, which had been picked up on account of its unusual shape. Even at first sight it appeared to me to present artificial striations and facets, and I therefore examined it more closely with a mineralogist's lens. This examination showed me that." Rather than a South American bola, this ovoid was thought to be a sling stone like the ones used in "New Caledonia". TWhe Pleistocene to Eocene sediments at Bramfored are over 2 million years old.

However, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, 2011 warns that even thouth the age is correct, the setting may be wront: "the Red Crag deposits date from the Gelasian chrono-stratigraphic phase, 2,588,000 to 1,806,000 years ago during the earliest phase of the Lower Pleistocene, when this part of Britain was under a shallow sea, and it seems most likely that the “sling-stone” is a simple case of misidentification, its natural grooves being mistaken for human manufacture by an expert who was overtaken by his colleague’s enthusiasm for finding objects in the deposit in question."

Below is a Melanesian Sling stone , the resemblance is striking, yet this one is evidently manmade, and polished.

Sling stone from New Caledonia. Source

Olduvai stone balls, Tanzania

The Museum of Stone Tools shows the following image captioned as a quartzite spheroid from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, age: Early Pleistocene Oldowan-Acheulean 0.4 to 1.9 million years ago.

Another example can be seen here, online, at the British Museum, which in its description cautions, that although Louis Leakey suggested that these rounded stones were used as bolas, like the throwing stones from the Pampas, "experiments have shown that such pieces can be produced by repeatedly using the same quartz pebble as a knapping hammer"

The Oldowan tools, are crude, like struck pebbles, and believed to be the work of Homo habilis, manufacturing spheroidal stone balls seems to be beyond their cognitive abilities. Could primitive hominins like them fashion sinew cords or treat leather adequatly to be able to fasten them to stone balls like the bolas or boleadoras of the Pampas?

An excellent summary of the Olduvai spheroids can be found in Ignacio de la Torre & Rafael Mora, 2010, which I summarize below:

Clark reported them in 1955, and their deliberate manufacture by flaking and battering to shape the speroids. He suggested they were used as missiles, and also as hammerstones for stone tool manufacture and to crack nuts open.

Willoughby proposed in 1987 that they were the result of flaking that began with the typical choppers, and that ended up as speroids, or, altermtively that they were used as hammers, an unintentional outcome of their use was the shaping of rounded spheroids.

Texier and Roche (1995) consider them as deliberate objects that arose from a method of knapping flakes. A core is battered, through controlled reduction to produce flakes and this results in a polyhedron, or a spheroid.

Java stone balls made by H. erectus

Leaving Africa, and the Oldowan, stone balls were found in sites associated to Homo erectus, who has been in Eurasia for around two million years. Weidenreich, 1943 describes in Indonesia at the Homo erectus site in Solo: "The most interesting specimen illustrated by Oppenoorth is a stone ball from Ngandong. Similar stone balls have been found at several places in our excavations in the Solo Valley. They are made of andesite, are perfectly round, and are never polished. According to Oppenoorth, their diameters range from 67 to 92 mm... [2.6 - 3.6 in], and some may be even a little larger. They closely resemble primitive stone cannon balls as used in Java in medieval times for the old bronze cannons. They occur so regularly in the layers that they might actually represent "implements" used by Solo men." He attributes them a Mousterian, and therefore Neanderthal similarity, citing similar stones found in La Quina, France, Techik Tach, Russia. Adding that "Mousterio-Levalloisian of Florisbad, South Africa, Dreyer and Lyle mention "dozens of round balls" about 3 inches in diameter made mostly of dolorite, and also a few of blue shales." Weidenreich mentions that the oldest balls were Acheulean, from Kenya, reported by Leakey, who found them "in many cases in groups of three strongly indicating the use of the bolas, still used as a hunting weapon in South." Weidenreich suggests that although their purpose is unknown they were either sling stones or bolas.

According to Bartstra (1983), cited in van Heteren & de Vos, 2012 describes tools and remains found at the Ngebung site in Java, belonging to H. erectus there are three levels, the deepest (lowest) has tools that are absent in the upper ones of Upper Pleistocene age: "elongated choppers, spherical balls (so called sling stones or bolas) and crude axes, all made of andesite. The larger stone tools, like the bolas are considered to be Upper Pleistocene/Lower Holocene of age." No explanation given for assigning a more recent age to the bolas.

Acheulean bolas in Israel

My own research into these primitive bolas has revealed other sources, for instance, outside of Africa, made by Homo erectus in Ubeidiya, Israel, with an age of 1.4 million yearws, as reported by Muller et al., 2023 with a clear spherical shape. The paper suggests that they were deliberately fashioned that way, to resemble speheres and its title echoes that suggestion: The limestone spheroids of ‘Ubeidiya: intentionalimposition of symmetric geometry by early hominins? Some of the stone balls studied in this paper are pictured below:

This article points out that their shape has bewildered archaeologists, as they can't understand what was their use. Furthermore, they have been used for millions of years, starting with the crude Oldowan stones industry, and into the Acheulean, and Mousterian, their use in Southern South America persisted until the late 1800s. Their widespread geographic dispersion, from Africa, to Asia, Europe, and America is notable.

There are two schools of though about these balls: (1) that they were the byproduct of a flake producing technique that left spheroids as waste, a totally unintentional production of stone balls. (2) That the hominins that made them selected a nodule and then deliberately fashioned it into a polyhedron, and gradually into a spheroid or bola. The balls found in Israel, according to the authors , "are a complex formal technology that represent a manifestation of the complex cognitive and skilful capacities of Early Acheulean hominins. If similar intentional shaping can be demonstrated on Oldowan spheroids, this would likely represent the earliest evidence of hominins imposing a desired symmetrical geometry on their tools." In other words, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were much smarter than we imagined.

Ancient or Modern?

S. J. de Laet mentions stone balls in the History of Humanity Volume I (see p. 454) in line with what I have mentioned further, up, but he questions their antiquity in Indonesia, suggesting a modern Homo sapiens origin:

"round stone balls (resembling small stone cannon-balls) that are allegedly found in terrace sediments along the Solo. They are made of andesite, are not polished and measure on average 10 cm in diameter. They are associated with Homo soloensis(on account of their assumed stratigraphical position), and they are regarded as a primitive hunting weapon, which is why these stone balls are oftenreferred to as bolas or sling-stones. Von Koenigswald even saw in them evidence for theNeanderthal character of the Solo hominids: similar stone balls do occur at such famousNeanderthal sites as La Quina (France) and Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) (von Koenigswald,1951). In Sangiran too these stone balls are found (and they are displayed in the local museum); but around the hill of Ngebung it can be demonstrated that they certainly do not lie buried in high-terrace sediments. In Ngebung the stone balls can be associated with young, post-Pleistocene alluvial deposits (Bartstra, 1985). The question therefore ariseswhether the stone balls found along the Solo do not in fact originate also from recent sediments, and reflect the activities of Holocene hunters rather than those of ancient Homo soloensis"

Spheres with symbolic purposes

There are some intriguing rounded stone ballls that were discovered in a site known as El Guettar, in Tunisia, first explored by Gruet in 1954) (S. J. de Laet, see p. 352). The stones were found, accomodated in the shape of a cairn!

"El Guettar did yield the best evidence for symbolic behaviour in the constructed heap of stone balls (Gruet,1954, pp. 67–77). The site had some 7 m [23 ft.]of Middle Palaeolithic deposits around a spring, and the stone heap was found near the base of the sequence, built on a flat surface by the edge of the spring pool. The heap was conical, with a basal diameter of about 130 cm [4.2 ft] and a height of about 70 cm [2.3 ft.], and was built of about sixty balls, almost all of them oflimestone, which were graded from large (18 cm in diameter [3.1 in]), rather roughly shaped one sat the base to small (4.5 cm in diameter [1.8 in]), perfectly shaped ones at the top. The interior of the cone was filled with a mass of bones and flaked stone artefacts (approximately 2,000 ofthe latter, including a typical tanged point). The bones and artefacts seemed to have been simply gathered up from the surrounding surface (they do not differ overall from those found elsewhere in the excavation), but some care was taken to reserve the finest artefacts for the upper part of the fill. At the base of the interior of the heap were two thin plaques of a non-local limestone.The detectable method and consistency in the construction of the heap suggest that it was built on one occasion, rather than over a period of time. That the heap stood undisturbed thereafter until it became buried indicates that it was not just a convenient way of storing stone balls. The excavator believed that it represented an offering to the genius loci of the spring. Practical explanations have not been forthcoming and we too are brought to conclude that its purpose must have been symbolic."

I must add that Gruet believed the site was of people with a Mousterian culture, i.e. Neanderthals, however other scholars, like Clark, consider it to be later, belonging to the more recent Aterian culture, of modern Homo sapiens and about 40 ky old.

Below is a picture of the stone cairn at El Guettar

Cairn found at Guettar. Source

Hammers?

A recent article by Assaf, Preysler, and Bruner, 2023 analyzes the shape, size and flaking used to fashion them and concludes that "Based on the current data available, we link the development of SSBs [shaped stone balls] with an increased consumption and extraction of fat of large-medium sized herbivores in the Lower Paleolithic period. Indeed, SSBs may also have been used as percussion tools for processing vegetal material, perhaps similarly to handaxes, which were primarily used for butchering, but were occasionally used for woodworking. However, current functional and experimental data associate these items with marrow extraction activities, as well as some contextual data linking these items with faunal remains. We thus argue that these are designated tools shaped in a complex procedure—a technological solution invented during the LP in order to respond to the growing need for fat consumption."

Closing Comments

The use of stone balls is ancient, dating back to the first stone tools used by our ancestors in Africa. They survived across species (H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans), and vast distances. They ended up in America where they were used for tens of thousands of years in the Pampas and Patagonia.

Were they introduced into the New World by H. erectus? and if so, is their great antiquity (as suggested by Ameghino at Miramar) could be an indication of that origin.

Finally, the Patagonian myth of Tachwull, them proto-human maker of bolas may be a memory of the presence of erectus in America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The controversial "bolas" from Miramar: 2 to 3 million years old

Florentino Ameghino, had, during the late 1800s found crude stone tools (eoliths), and remains of baked clay in deep, ancient sedimentary layers along the steep banks of some rivers, and the coastline, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. He attributed them to a locally evolved, Pampean hominin from the Tertiary period, that evolved into modern humans and then peopled the World (see this post about it). This was controversial and attacked by U.S. scholars who supported a later peopling of America ~3,000 years BP and, surely not older than 10,000 years ago. They attributed the tools, and bones found by Ameghino to Holocene Native Americans, and the baked earth to volcanic activity (the earth had been cooked at temperatures of around 1,000 °C (1,850°F).

In a recent post I mentioned that the Pampas in Argentina was an ideal spot to look for Denisovans or Homo erectus in America. One year ago I mentioned relatively old human footsteps on the Atlantic coastline of Buenos Aires, at Claromecó, 30,000 years old.

Miramar Bolas

When Florentino Ameghino died in 1911, his brother Carlos, who had always worked on the field, searching for fossils and ancient tools for Florentino, continued the work of his brother and visited some sites along the coast of Buenos Aires. He was sponsored by the museums of La Plata, and Natural History of Buenos Aires, finding tools in sediments belonging to the Chapadmalense layer, a Pliocene formation roughly 2 or 3 million years old. Named after a coastal area between Miramar and Mar del Plata, on the seabord of Buenos Aires.

Among the tools reported by Carlos Ameghino, were some spherical "bolas" (balls) on the seaside cliffs in Miramar, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (Google map), which were of a Late Miocene age! Pictured below, they were made from bone (Source).

Below is an image with some of the tools recovered in Miramar by Carlos Ameghino (Bonomo, 2022):

Figure 7. Pre-Ensenadean and Pre-Belgranean materials from Punta Hermengo, Miramar: lithic artifacts on quartzite (a-b), bone bolas point and ball (c-d) and stone bolas (e-f)

Bolas

Bolas (also known as "Boleadoras") were used by historic Natives in the pampas to hunt animals, and kill their enemies. There were different types of bolas, but the principle was the same. They were stones balls sheathed with leather and attached to strong tendon straps that were whirled above the head to gain momentum and then thrown so as to entangle around the hunted animal’s legs. Bolas could have one ball (bola perdida or "lost Ball"), something like a single sling shot that goes off, stone and sling. Or two or more balls tied with individual cords to a knot. These were used to hung rheas (South American ostriches), deer, guanacos (a wild relative of the llama), and other smaller animals. They were deadly. Ancient bolas were carefully crafted in hard stone, and grooved along their midline to attach the sinew there. Later historical natives were not as skilful as their paleoindian ancestors and made them from softer soapstone. Below is an image from Musters journey (1869-70) in Patagonia, showing a Tehuelche native using bolas on horseback.

Patagonian hunting, notice the boleadoras in his hand and slung on his waist.

Controversy and Rejection

The Miramar findings were disputed by Antonio Romero, 1918: "the artifacts, similar to classic Neolithic types, found at Brusquitas and attributed to a human being already existing in the Miocene period, are a fallacious supposition, whose audacity surpasses even the famous discovery of the California skull by Blake and Widney. The being that made fire and cracked pebbles in a crude and rudimentary way at the end of the Late Miocene (Puelche and Chapalmal), according to F. Ameghino, was not a human being but a remotely distant precursor of humankind."

Romero claimed that the tools were recent and the work of historic "Indians" which were dragged or moved into older sediments due to erosion on the cliff. Adding that ancient fossils were removed by the sea, eroded from older layers and redeposited in more recent ones. The cliff wasn't made of ancient Chapadmalal sediments, but more recent ones. That the baked earth (which Ameghino attributed to coarse ceramics made by ancient hominins) were the outcome of natural fires that burned the dry grasslands and cooked the clay in the soil.

Vignatti, 1919, on the other hand, defended Ameghino, and cited the conclusions reached by the auditing committee sent to inspect the site in 1915, composed of experts (Santiago Roth, Walther Schiller, Lutz Witte, M. Kantor, L. M. Torres, and Carlos Ameghino, the brother of Florentino). Their affidavit says that "the visual inspection of the site where the aforementioned artifacts were found has not given cause to suppose that they were buried under one circumstance or another at a time subsequent to the formation of the layer; that they were in their original position and that, therefore, they should be considered as objects of human manufacture, contemporary to the geological floor in which they were found deposited." This means that they were of the same age as the sediments in which they were found, from the Chapadmalense, and didn't slip down into it from more recent layers. Furthermore, the committee (Source) saw a bola-shaped stone unearthed in their presence, from the cliff, in the same layer that other bolas had been found. A flint knife was also retrieved as well as a flat stone like the ones used by the historic natives to make fire. Finally, fossil remains of a ground sloth (Gravigradae) were discovered, associated to a round stone.

However, a renown geologist Frenguelli in 1920 revised the stratigraphy and dating of the cliff, and assigned an Early Pleistocene age to the layers that Ameghino had thought were Miocene (source).

In 1924, Frenguelli and Outes dig in Miramar and ratify that the sediments are not Tertiary, but from the Quaternary. They found a bola with an equatorial groove, roughly 6.5 cm (2.5") diameter made of white quartzite weighing 340 g (0.75 lbs). They attribute it to a "Mousterian" appearance and add that the bola was firmly buried in the soil. Both authors conclude that: "The polished projectiles ("balls"), clearly defined, coexisted with industrial artifacts that morphologically represent all periods of the Early and Middle Pleistocene. They point out, then, that the discovery of "balls" in ancient sediments should not surprise any specialist, since their presence had already been noted in Europe by one of the most distinguished forerunners of archaeology, Boucher de Perthes, who recalled that "European Pleistocene balls" appeared mostly in Mousterian sites."

Hoax?

Some authors even suggested that Lorenzo Parodi, a local amateur archaeologist who helped Carlos Ameghino in collecting and finding fossils, was the author of a hoax. He placed recent objects in ancient sediments and then "discovered" them by "chance" (see Tonni, 2016). Below is a photograph of a bola in Tertiary sediments in Miramar, from that same source:

Too polished and well finished to be so old

Vignatti, 1941 included an image of polished stone bolas from the Chapadmalense sediments. As you can see in the image below, they are neat, polished, and quite different from the coarse knapped flint knives found close to them. He states that these supposedly ancient bolas are hard to tell apart from those used by contemporary Pampas gauchos (local "cowboys") and historic Indians. Yet he did not dispute their antiquity.

The coarse vs. polished finish had been brought up in 1924, questioning the bolas and tools unearthed by Frenguelli and Outes: "many specialists harbor suspicions. This suspicion arises from the coexistence, at such ancient levels, of carved stone objects with polished ones characteristic of more recent cultures. Outes and Frenguelli state that they do not share these scruples, as the Stone Age in Argentina has not yet been systematically studied, primarily from stratigraphic and technological perspectives. The authors believe that, to date, it can only be stated, and even then only relatively, that "the peoples most closely linked to the matter under discussion manufactured a large number of Paleolithic stone tools and weapons, and, exceptionally, a limited group of polished stone tools.""

As I will discuss in my next post, stone balls were common around the Old World, and found in very ancient sites, together with Oldowan tools, the oldest tool-making technology used by our hominin ancestors. Though coarse, the African and Eurasian stone balls are the work of H. erectus, and possibly Neanderthals. They are uncommon in more recent humans, and were only used as boleadoras in South-central Argentina by historic natives, and their ancestors, the paleoindians. Could they have been brought here by Old World hominins, to the cul-de-sac at the end of the Americas, the point that is furthest from Africa, where it was adopted by the later waves of modern humans?

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