Patagonian monsters: August 2026

Monday, August 3, 2026

Homo erectus in the Americas, some things I found on the Internet

I came across some short texts posted by Richard Thornton (his mini bio), in which he discusses a statue protraying an ape-like creature found in Mexico. Thornton suggests that it is the depiction of a captive Homo erectus.

In Homo Erectus in the coastal marshes of Tabasco State, Mexico? (October 25, 2024) he includes some pictures he took in the 1970s, including one that he describes as "...quite controversial after public exposure, since it does not portray a Homo Sapiens with typical Indigenous American features. However, mainstream archaeologists still refuse to admit the possibility that the millions of animals that crossed back and forth across the Bering Land Bridge over the past two million years were followed by primitive hominids."

A second post Homo Erectus in the Americas? (April 15, 2022) includes the following image:

Statue supposedly depicting an Homo erectus. Richard Thornton, 2022.

Thornton wrote: "It looked like a primitive hominid, such as Homo Erectus, not a New World Monkey. He is portrayed standing erect with his hands tied behind his neck. This is the typical way that Mesoamerican art portrays prisoners of war or people captured to be made into slaves. Monkeys were always portrayed with their arms and legs tied together, hanging from poles."

The final post is titled: Did Homo Erectus live in the Americas until fairly recently? (December 6, 2023) and includes this text "There are stories, both in the Lower Southeastern United States and in Southeast Asia of primitive humans with tails, who were capable of hurling rocks and sharpened sticks at Homo Sapiens humans. Those in what is now the United States disappeared soon after the arrival of Europeans. Apparently, they were extremely vulnerable to European diseases. During the Vietnam War, such creatures supposedly attacked both U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, who ventured into an uninhabited mountain range in what was then South Vietnam."

Some comments

The spider and howler monkeys are common in the southern areas of Mexico. They represented good fortune, happiness, lust, pleasure in the Central American lore. They were sacred animals and were not used for sacrifices nor eaten (source). Below are some Mesoamerican depictions of monkeys (same source), they have a monkey appearance:

Thornton is right in his posts when he says the statue has been moved. It ended up in the Villahermosa museum and is known as "Monument 56", its name is "Monkey Looking at the Sky."

The sculpture although it is shaped as a column is believed to be a peg-like structure which was to be displayed horizontally. It shows a head and a torso of a simian (anthropomorphic) figure with its arms bent backwards, behind the neck. It has a round-shaped eye and a narrow bridged nose. The creature wears a hat or helmet, and the back of the hands have been lost. It has triangular ears. It is 1.36 m long (roughly 4.5 ft.) and 53 cm wide (21") and 48 cm thick (19"). It is made of a tough hornblende andesite.

"It is highly likely that this sculpture was originally embedded horizontally; that is, the section resembling the body is the tenon that secured it as part of a building's architectural structure." (Source, and also source of the following images):

Finally, the comments about Vietnam and sightings there during the war are new to me. I will look into it. The remark about them being vulnerable to European diseases makes sense. Illnesses like measles, human flu, and small pox would affect hominins but not monkeys.

Sunday, August 2, 2026

The shape of the human face helps identify our distant ancestors, and they were Eurasians!

A paper published in Nature by Lacruz, R.S., Stringer, C.B., Kimbel, W.H. et al. in 2019 (The evolutionary history of the human face. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 726–736 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0865-) — which can be read for free here suggests that our ancestry derives from Eurasian hominins, not African ones.

The authors discuss the last common ancestor (LCA) of modern humans and place it in the Mid Pleistocene (MP). They wonder which of the known MP hominins is our ancestor. They use the human face as a standard to define our LCA. The paper, published in an orthodox and renown journal like Nature can't go against the estsablished Out of Africa (OOA) dogma, so it has to somehow acknowledge the African origin of modern humans, but does it in a grudging, reluctant way. The paper states that "...the LCA should predate the appearance of a modern face, which begs the question: what is the earliest evidence of a modern human face? In considering the origins of the human face, we should take into account that mounting genetic and morphological data support the notion that H. sapiens first appeared in Africa. But these same data also imply that, while fully fledged H. sapiens likely had an African beginning, the evolutionary origins of traits that are characteristic of the modern face, represented by the LCA, may be found elsewhere." And elsewhere can only mean outside of Africa, in Eurasia.

After suggesting that Homo heidelbergensis, also found in Africa, as Homo rhodesiensis could be our LCA, the authors raise some questions about this idea (they seem to be too robust), and state that:

"This issue is further complicated by the apparent presence of a more H. sapiens-like midfacial morphology in Chinese fossils from the MP, such as Zhoukoudian, Nanjing (Fig. 3d), Dali and Jinniushan. This morphology is especially apparent in the newly announced (but not yet published scientifically) cranium, said to be from Harbin, North East China. These examples could perhaps be the result of gene flow or an independent evolutionary trajectory convergent on that of H. sapiens, raising the issue of whether these differences are phylogenetically informative. However, an alternative and plausible scenario implicates the morphology of the early European hominin species, Homo antecessor...
... In this scenario, a more ancient and taxonomically distinct LCA for the H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis lineages is based on the ‘modern’ maxillary conformation of the ATD6-69 H. antecessor face from Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, dated at ~850 ka...
The evidence instead suggests that the large and non-H. sapiens-like faces of Bodo and Broken Hill 1 (Fig. 3b,c) represent taxonomic diversity in the African MP record, which could exclude the large fossils assigned to H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis as representative of an ancestral morph for H. sapiens. Given other shared and more H. sapiens-like facial morphologies, ranging from the late lower Pleistocene of Europe to the MP of China and Africa, it begins to look more parsimonious to interpret a H. antecessor-like facial morphology as primitive for the clade containing H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. This symplesiomorphic morphology was also present in at least some fossils assigned to Chinese H. erectus, in other archaic Chinese hominins and in the lineage of H. sapiens present in Africa from ~500 Ky, while it was apparently lost in the H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and H. neanderthalensis lineages."

This suggestion is relevant, it somehow implies that non-African hominins, from China, and others from Eurasia, including Homo erectus, and also the Homo antecessor fossils from Spain are more human-like than fossils found in Africa older than 500,000 years ago. So, there is plenty of evidence of ancient human-like faces in Eurasia before it appeared in Africa! The authors, tacitly suggest that modern humans did not originate in Africa. They appeared in Eurasia and back-migrated there from Eurasia around 500 kya!

Saturday, August 1, 2026

Archaic Admixture (within Africa) a new paper (Science Jul. 30, 2026)

A paper published in the non-peer reviewed BioRxiv last March (see my post on it) has been now published in Science, on July 30, 2026 (Yulin Zhang et al., Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs. Science 0,eaef8874 DOI:10.1126/science.aef8874). It discusses ghost introgressions in modern human populations. My original post highlighted its main points. Today, re-reading the article, I found some interesting points, which I discuss below.

Heterozygosity and archaic introgression

All research about Amerindians and all other non-Africans, stresses that they have higher homozygosity than Africans, a signal of a lower diversity in their genes. They are less heterozygous. I have argued in several posts that the higher heterozygosity observed in Africans could come from their recent admixture with archaics that survived until recently, within Africa.

This paper reported that (highlighting is mine) "Several additional lines of evidence support our results of ghost ancestry in modern humans. First, we find that genomic regions harboring ghost ancestry exhibit elevated heterozygosity levels, a pattern also observed for Neanderthal and Denisovan segments (fig. S25). The elevation in heterozygosity is consistent with a model of introgression from a deeply divergent lineage..."

The authors note that sub-Saharan Africans have the highest levels of super-archaic ghost admixture, and non-Africans have much lower values, but they attribute it to a bottleneck effect following the Out Of Africa (OOA) migration, ignoring the possibility of recent admixture within Africa: "We find that ghost ancestry peaks are over-represented in sub-Saharan African populations relative to non-African populations, which is consistent with the lower genetic diversity in non-Africans."

Africans and admixture there, in Africa

Regarding "deserts" where ghost presence is lacking, they attribute it to the same cause, the OOA migration: !We also identify 97 deserts of ghost ancestry (i.e., regions that are at least 10 Mbp long and have less than 0.1% frequency of ghost ancestry). These deserts are only found in non-African populations, with nearly half (43.3%) shared between different non-African groups, likely formed during the OOA bottleneck (supplementary section S6.3 and figs. S37 and S38). We do not identify any ghost ancestry deserts in sub-Saharan Africans." A plausible explanation for this is that ghosts introgressed within Africa, leading to a total lack of deserts there, while in the rest of the world, deserts point at a lack of superarchaic admixing.

In my original post I highlighted their comment about the source of the ghost population, I will once again quote the authors comments: "The ghost lineage, with a divergence time similar to Neanderthals, could plausibly correspond to Middle Pleistocene Homo groups or African Homo heidelbergensis populations that directly admixed with modern human ancestors before the OOA dispersal. For the super-archaic lineage, one potential candidate—compatible with the split time of approximately 1.8 Mya—is Homo erectus, as suggested by earlier studies."

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