Lovelock "giants" revisited (Post 4)

Today's is the fourth post in this series about the redheaded giants of Lovelock Cave, Nevada. In it, I will discuss some points mentioned by Reid and his sources about a local cryptid, and the belief held by Reid that these tule-eating giants were in fact Neanderthals.

This is the full series of posts on Lovelock Cave's "giants":

  • Post 1
  • Post 2
  • Post 3
  • Post 4
  • Post 5
  • January 2014 post mentioning Lovelock Cave.

Neanderthals

Dorothy P. Dansie published an article in the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Fall 1975, titled John T. Reid's Case for the Redheaded Giants. Besides the documents about readheaded giants, she also added some context, mentioning skulls that John Reid believed were Neanderthal skulls.

Dansie notes that Reid was a mine engineer and geologist, however, he didn't have any formal training in anthropology or archaeology, but he was a smart person and sought the advice and support of professional scholars.

She adds that "Reid's research had led him to believe he possessed Neanderthal skulls", so he wrote to the leading antrhropologist in America at that time, Ales Hrdlicka. Hrdlicka together with William Henry Holmes of the Smitshonian Institution, and Thomas Chamberlin of the United States Geological Survey, refused to accept that humans had reached America before the end of the last Ice Age, and placed their arrival around 3,000 to 10,000 years ago. So, when Reid wrote to him about the possibility that the skulls belonged to Neanderthals, Hrdlicka rejected the idea, and "simply referring Reid to Hrydlica's publications on the subject."

But Reid didn't give up. Dansie reports that "Reid had read of unusual skulls having been found in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa and also of General H. G. Thomas's exhumation of skulls in Dakota Territory "... like those of the great gibbon monkey..." So he sought advice elsewhere.

The Dakota Skulls of 1872

I will add some context to this statement about General Thomas and the Dakota Territory skulls.

These remains came from ancient Indian mounds. Cyrus Thomas (1825-1910) had an eclectic career, studying medicine, law, working as a school superintendent, and a Lutheran Evangelist minister. He helped found the Illinois Natural History in 1859 and in 1869, joined the Hayden Survey of the Northern Rockies as an entomologist. In 1873 he was appointed Professor of Natural History at Southern Illinois Normal University. In 1881 he was named Direcotr of the Division of Mound Exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology. (Source). It was during his service in North-Central USA in 1872, that he arrived at what then was the Dakota Territory (now North Dakota), and met General H. G. Thomas there. His account (which can be read in "Thomas, Cyrus 1873 Ancient mounds of Da ko ta. Geological Survey of the Territories for 1873. Government Printing Office, Washington, pp. 655-658) tells us that he was taveling in the Territory of Dakota in the summer of 1872, and learned about some mounds in the area. The local military force led by General H. G. Thomas provided him with support and Sioux guides and soldiers to help him excavate the mounds.

The mounds were, according to Cyrus, 2 miles southeast of Jamestown, North Dakota on Pipestone Creek (now named Pipestem Creek) see the approximate site in Google Maps.

Cyrus unearthed several human skeletons and drew a sketch of the mounds. He found nothing unsual. He also included a text written by General H. G. Thomas who had cut into some mounds before his arrival (Source); below I quote the relevant part of it; the highlight is mine:

"The crowning argument however comes with the skull. It is unlike that of any human being to day alive on this continent the frontal bone being low receding growing narrow and pinched from the brows up the top of the head depressed in the center. The cavity of the cranium is full seven inches long and a scant four and a half inches wide. The orbital ridges or eyebrows are excessively developed like those of the great Gibbon monkey. In fact the whole skull resembles that of the great Gibbon monkey.
HG THOMAS Captain Twentieth Infantry Brer Brig Gen USA"

Thomas believed these were oddly shaped skulls was not that of a modern human being. Of course Reid would believe that these primitive skulls were those of Neanderthals.

So, we will return to our main story, back in Lovelock Nevada.

Neanderthal skulls in Lovelock

Dansie wrote that "during the summer of 1928 Reid was visited by S. de la Rue and Mary Sasse whom he claimed were well informed on the subject, having studied in museums in Europe. They took measurements of the skulls and " ... had no hesitation in pronouncing these Neanderthal. ... " They returned to Lovelock in 1929 and told Reid that they had submitted the skulls to various authorities before depositing them with the Museum of Natural History in New York and that they were more than ever convinced of their first evaluation".

So, these skulls never became part of the collection of the Nevada Historical Society in 1984, who acquired Reid's original collection. They ended up in New York City. I have not been able to find any information about S. de la Rue or Mary Sasse.

Dansie adds that "Dr. Clark Wissler, then Curator in Chief, Division of Anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, in due time informed Reid that the skeletons appeared to be of a type of early man (MS February 1, 1933)."

A newspaper article published in the Mason Valley News, Yerington, Nevada, 02 May 1931, titled Much Interest Taken in Lovelock History reports that Reid had said he'd found evidence of the presence of Mayan people in the region. It also mentions the 7 foot tall skeleton discovered nearby by Lloyd de la Montanya, and Reid's collection and the Lovelock cave redheaded giants, described as "red-heads, known scientifically as the Sid-ucah or Neanderthal race." You can read the article following the link above. Below is a cropped image.

The shape of the skulls

An interesting point is that Reid corresponded with Wissler and sent him bones and artifacts. In a letter dated October 1930, Reid wrote to Wissler about a grave where "another skull had been found, which Reid described as being that of a typical roundhead Indian distinctly different from the longheaded, redheaded people represented by the remains in the shipment (Letter, October 30, 1930, to Mr. Clark Wossler, Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York)."

This is a new fact about the redheaded people. Unlike the typical Indians like the Paiute, who had "round" skulls, that is, brachycephalic, the redheaded tule-eaters had elongated crania, that is, dolichocephalic.

Native Americans have both broad and long headed skulls (brachycephalic and dolichocephalic). Shape varies between regions, time periods, and ethnic groups, but the Paleoindians were mostly dolichocephalic. Only later did the natives shift towards rounder skulls (brachycephalic).

The skulls of Kennewick Man from Washington USA and Luzia, from Lagoa Santa, Brazil were dolichocephalic, and date back to around 10,000 years ago. They were paleoindians. The fact that later and modern Native Americans have rounded crania suggests that a second, more recent wave of migrants reache the Americas, and these were brachycephalic.

Intriguingly, (Boggione et al., 2025) Neanderthals and Denisovans (Qiang Ji et al., 2021) had elongated skulls, just like the ancient paleoindians had.

My next post will look into the local myths regarding a hominin-like monster that lived in that area.

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

Chromosome 2 - Uniquely human

In a recent post, I wrote about the split between chimpanzees, bonobos, and the Homo genus, and also looked into the possibility that the split took place in Eurasia. In this post we will discuss a little known fat that sets us, humans, apart from all other apes, the fact that we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while they have 24.

Humans have 23 pairs (46 chromosomes) while the other apes have 24 pairs (48 chromosomes)

We often read that chimpanzees and bonobos share roughly 99% of their genetic material with humans. They are our closest living relatives, but we couldn't mate with them successfully because our number of chromosomes differs.

The African gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, and the Asian orangutans, extant apes, all carry 24 pairs of chromosomes, a total of 48. We, humans (and also our Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors) carry 23 pairs, with 46 chromosomes in total. This feature sets us apart from all of the great apes.

Changes in the number, shape, or structure of the chromosomes in a species plays a role in evolution, leading to the formation of new species (speciation). This phenomenon, known as "karyotype evolution" (karyotype is the array of chromosomes in a given species) was first detected by Wilson and Painter in 1935, who observed the fusion of chromosomes in fruit flies.

Fusion is what happened to reduce the number of chromosomes carried by humans. Two chromosomes in apes, known as chromosome 2a and chromosome 2b, fused together forming our chromosome 2. So the total count dropped from 24 to 23 pairs.

The following image, from Culajay, 2025, shows how our chromosome 2 (top) aligns with chromosomes 2a and 2b in chimps, gorillas, and orangutans:

The process of fusion of two chromosomes is complex (see Ijdo et al., 1991 and Fan et al., 2002). I prepared the following image to clarify the process. A regular pair of chromosomes, "X" shape to the left is composed of two individual chromosomes linked up at their "centromeres". During cellular division inside a cell, fibers attach to the centromere and and pulls the chromosomes apart, half going to one side, the other half going to the opposite side of the dividing cell. So centromeres play an important role in regulating the division of cells, and reproduction, where the sexual cells carry half the chromosome load compared to regular ones.

Chr 2a and 2b fuse, making human Chr 2. Copyright © 2026 by Austin Whittall

The tips of each chromosme have "telomeres", which act as protective caps located and help maintain the chromosome's structure and stability. They are a long DNA helix with a certain sequence combining the bases Cytosine (C), Thymine (T), Adenine (A), and Guanine (G) of the form 5'-(TTAGGG)_n-(CCCTAA)_m-3' (where 5' and 3' are specific carbon atoms, and "m" and "n" are the number of repeats of each sequence of bases and ranges between 800 and 2,500.

The fusion of chromosomes 2a and 2b led to the telomeres linking up, and to a new, fused, chromosome 2, with two centromeres. For the chromosome to be able to work, and be functional, one of the centromeres became deactivated, and we can see it, surviving as a relict in our chromosome 2. The telomeric regions fused together also survive, in an area known as 2q13 where the vestigial telomeres survive, with their respective 5'-(TTAGGG)_n-(CCCTAA)_m-3' sequences linked head to head.

This took place as a random mutation in one individual of a group of pre-human apes. And this individual when he or she mated with other members of the group, passed on this new trait to its descent, as we will see below.

Speciation, Homo genus appears

But how could an individual with 47 chromosomes mate with those with 48 chromosomes?

So, by chance or a random event, an individual is born, carrying the fused chromosome 2, a total of 47 chromosomes. It would be a fertile person, and could mate with other members (with 48 chromosomes).

The following image is from Stankiewicz, 2016(One pedigree we all may have come from - did Adam and Eve have the chromosome 2 fusion? Mol Cytogenet. 2016 Sep 26;9:72. doi: 10.1186/s13039-016-0283-3. PMID: 27708712; PMCID: PMC5037601). It is a diagram showing how one, the first, unique individual with 47 chromosomes can mate with others, despite carrying 47 chromosomes, and how, in a few generations, some individuals end up with 46 chromosomes (which include two copies of the fused chromosome 2), and speciation becomes fixed.

Stankiewicz proposes that the original group where the mutation arose was a "gorilla-like polygamous pedigree of a putative early modern human clan" It was in this group that the fused chromosome 2 became fixed as a homozygous element. The diagram shows a two parents, a male ◻ and a female ◯, in Generation I, who have one son, a male, of Generation II, who was the first to carry the fused chromosome 2 in a heterozygous form. This male is represented by ◩. He mates with different females ◯ who carry 48 chromosomes. They produce offspring in Generation III, some are of the regular "normal" kind, with 48 chromosomes both boys (◻) and a girls (◯), others carry 47 chromosomes boys (◩) and girls (◐). There are a number of miscarriages or stillborn babies caused by "chromosome imbalances" (▲)

Those who are heterozygous in the 3rd Generation, and mate with each other (◩ and ◐) will produce offspring in Generation IV, some of them will not be viable (▲), others will have 48 chromosomes like the original population (◻ and ◯), others will carry a heterozygous form with 47 chromosomes (◩, ◐), but some, few, will have 46 chromosomes, homozygous for the fused chromosome 2: boys (■) and girls (⚫)

Benefits of the fused chromosome

According to Stankiewicz, the 46 chromosome variant spread in this population because it provided an evolutionary advantage possibly linked to higher fertility or to improved brain and cognitive development. Furthermore, it could have promoted bipedalism, or physiological aspects such as "endurance running, or improved thermo-regulation by an enhanced sweating capacity".

Culajay, 2025 highlights the impact of the fused chromosome 2 on human evolution. The change altered the shape and therefore the functioning of our genome. It led to modifications in the shape of our pelvis that resulted in our bipedalism.

When did this event take place?

The short answer is that we don't know. Nevertheless, there are some educated guesses, as we will see below.

According to Jiang et al., 2024, the chromosome 2 fusion event "is not a recent evolutionary event but potentially occurred during African great ape speciation" adding that "Given fossil evidence that Australopithecus existed around 2-4 mya, Paranthropus around 1-3 mya, and the earliest Homo fossils around 2-3 mya, we speculate that this fusion event did arise in the genus Homo but rather occurred in ancestral great ape populations that would give rise to humans" (highlight is mine)

We know that this trait, the fused chromosome 2, is shared by our relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals: "We conclude that Denisovans and modern humans (and presumably Neandertals) shared a karyotype consisting of 46 chromosomes." (Reich et al., 2012). So the event that led to the fusion took place before the split between Neanderthals & Denisovans, and Humans. This makes it older than 800,000 years.

Research published by Dreszer et al., 2007. (Biased clustered substitutions in the human genome: The footprints of male-driven biased gene conversion. Genome Research, 17(10), 1420–1430. https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.6395807) analyzing "unexpected biased clustered substitutions (UBCS)" found close to telomeres, estimated that "the fusion occurred as recently as 740,000 years ago and no more than ∼3 million years ago." This is a wide range, spanning from the Denisovan-Neanderthal-Human split, backwards into the Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, or even the Homo naledi all of which may have shared with us the fused chromosome 2.

These UBCS statistics used by Dreszer were revised and improved by Poszewiecka et al., 2022 (Revised time estimation of the ancestral human chromosome 2 fusion. BMC Genomics. 2022 Aug 25; 23 (Suppl 6):616. doi: 10.1186/s12864-022-08828-7. PMID: 36008753; PMCID: PMC9413910). Their study of chromosome 2 (highlight is mine) "estimated its formation time at 0.9 Mya with a 95% confidence interval of 0.4-1.5 Mya"

Culajay, 2025, focusing on the effects of the fusion on bipedalis and pelvic shape argues that the date of this event is older than 5 million years ago because it ties in with the modification of hip shape observed in Australopithecus afarensis and the even earlier Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 Mya): "The timing of the Chromosome 2 fusion is best placed more than 5 million years ago, possibly 6.9–7.4 Mya, near the divergence of humans and chimpanzees." (Highlight is mine)

Comments

Perhaps we may be able to obtain the genome of Homo erectus, or Homo floresiensis or other ancient hominins, and check if they have 46 or 48 chromosomes. This would help us learn if they are members of our "human" tree or not.

Another interesting point is that the fusion of chromosome 2 is clear scientific proof of evolution in action. A random event produces a mutant, and the mutation leads to a new species. This is a thorn in the side of "creationists" who can't explain it away. They do, of course, come up with ridiculous alternatives: they argue that the telomere fusion and centromere deactivation is a misinterpretation of the data; that God created humans with 46 chromosomes, and created apes with 46. God can create as he wishes. I rest my case.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

Another post on dental enamel protein AMBN 273V or M in Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Humans

In three different posts I mentioned dental enamel protein as a tool to investigate ancient ancestry, admixtures, and archaic introgressions.

The first post looked into a paper by Quiamei Fu, et al., 2026, Enamel proteins from six Homo erectus specimens across China, published in Nature on May 13, 2026 (vol. 655, pp 141–147 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10478-8), it suggests archaic introgression from Homo erectus into Denisovans, and from them, into modern humans, which shared a protein found in teeth enamel, named AMBN(M273V) from erectus via Denisovans to us, Homo sapiens.

The second post mentioned another protein found in teeth, called COL17A1 that is found in its ancestral form in Paranthropus robustus and Homo naledi, and in derived form in--Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans. Suggesting that naledi may not be a homo (see Madupe P, Taurozzi A, Koenig C., et al., Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers. Cell, 2026; 189, 4415-4424.e11).

The third post mentioned another recent paper that questions the archaic introgression hypothesis proposed by Fu et al. and suggesting other alternatives for the presence of AMBN 237V in Denisovans and humans, that don't require an introgression with Homo erectus (see No signal of a super-archaic origin of the Denisovan AMBN gene, a comment on the protein affinity of Homo erectus and Denisovan enamel proteins, Ioannis Patramanis, Frido Welker, Laurits Skov. bioRxiv 2026.08.11.744165; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.11.744165).

Today I will discuss a fourth paper on the subject of dental enamel proteins, published last week, on August 26, 2026 by Paula Kotli; Enamel Palaeoproteomics Successfully Distinguishes between Denisovans and European Neandertals (bioRxiv 2026.08.22.746388; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.22.746388).

Kotli compared DNA from the Penghu jawbone, dredged up from the sea in Taiwan, and a Neanderthal from Portugal and found that the AMBN V273 variant (with a Valine aminoacid substitution there —hence the "V") was exclusively Denisovan while the Neanderthal carried a Methionone aminoacid there (M273 variant). These two proteins can serve as markers to identify the origin of ancient teeth when DNA is not correctly preserved; tooth peptides last longer than DNA.

Most modern humans carry the M273 variant, shared with Neanderthals, while not only Penghu, but other Denisvoans (like the Denisova 3 specimen) carry the V273 variant. Unsurprisingly, the region with the highest levels of Denisovan admixture, the Philippines, also has the highest level among all modern humans of the V273 variant: It reaches "a notably elevated frequency of ∼21% in modern Philippine populations (compared to <1% globally)."

Africans and archaic admixture

While researching about ancient teeth proteins and their prevalence among modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, I came across a good paper on the subject: Zanolli C, Hourset M, Esclassan R, Mollereau C. Neanderthal and Denisova tooth protein variants in present-day humans. PLoS One. 2017 Sep 13;12(9):e0183802. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183802. PMID: 28902892; PMCID: PMC5597096. In it, they mention the presence of rare variants found in Denisovans and Neanderthals, inside Africa. This is quite unexpected because both of those ancestral lineages are not known to have existed within Africa and the current view is that they admixed with the humans that left Africa in the Out of Africa migration. So, how did these rare variants find their way into the genes of Africans?

Zanolli et al. write (highlight is mine): "The finding in living Africans of rare derived polymorphisms that were present in Neanderthals (Fig 2: ENAM G389S, 5%) or Denisova (Fig 3: CEMP1 R80H, 0.5%) is difficult to reconcile with the fact that interbreeding of AMH with Neanderthals occurred out of Africa. However, as mentioned above, this could be explained by the inside Africa admixture between the ancestors of AMH and archaic hominins, or by the possible back migration of Neanderthal gene flux. Further genome analysis of the Neanderthal and Denisova polymorphisms in AMBN, ENAM, and CEMP1 certainly deserves attention as they could trace back an African ancestor common to Neanderthals, Denisova and early anatomically modern humans" The final comment is expected: these rare alleles could be the faint trace of the last common ancestor shared by Humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. I choose to believe that they are the result of admixing between archaics and recent Africans within Africa.

The ENAM G389S variant is, according to the supplementary material found at rates of zero in Europe, South Asia, and East Asia, at 5% in Africans, and at 0.3% in America. So how did it exist in Neanderthals but leave no trace elsewhere, but in Africa and America (Maybe slave trade brought it to America?). The other variant, the Denisovan CEMP1 R80H is found at zero levels everywhere except Africa where it reaches 0.5%. Denisovans in Africa?

K 55 E variant

Another ancient (ape variant) is found at surprisingly high levels in Africa, with 26%, but only at 2% in Americas, 0.2% in Europe, zero in East Asia, and 0.1% in South Asia. This variant is known as K55E (rs13331643) in CEMP1, and is commonly shared in this ancestral form with gorillas and chimpanzees.

So, basically, all modern humans in the rest of the world carry the derived allele of K55. Surprisingly, the ancestral variant, found in Africa at 26% frequency, is also found in Denisovans and Neanderthals. Again, a contradiction to the belief that Africans never mingled with those hominins.

The paper tries to explain this incongruity as follows (note that AMH means "anatomically modern humans"): "This suggests that the ancestral variant may have not been favorable to AMH outside Africa or, conversely, that the derived allele was specific to AMH and evolved out of Africa due to a founder effect. The ancestral archaic variant could also explain in part the tendency of people with African origins to have larger crowns and root volume and surface. Indeed, this variant is also found in Neanderthals teeth, characterized by high crown dimensions and frequent taurodontism. The presence of this variant in Denisova is also compatible with such traits."

Why would the non-Africans, who mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans not uptake their ancestral K55 variant in higher frequencies, and instead retain a mutation (the derived form), while Africans, who supposedly never met the Neanderthals & Denisovans, carry the ancestral variant?

I don't see how this fits in with the Out of Africa theory. The admixing of Denisovans in Asia can explain its presence there, and also in America, and Europe where Neanderthal admixture is higher, but why is it so prevalent in Africa? Maybe, the cause is an introgression of super-archics into the recent African populations.

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

Misterious Middle Eastern (non-African) homo, not Neanderthals or modern humans (Denisovans?)

Two 2021 papers published in Science, one by Israel Hershkovitz et al. (A Middle Pleistocene Homo from Nesher Ramla, Israel, Science 372, 1424-1428. DOI:10.1126/science.abh3169 🔒), the other by Yossi Zaidner et al. (Middle Pleistocene Homo behavior and culture at 140,000 to 120,000 years ago and interactions with Homo sapiens.Science 372, 1429-1433. DOI:10.1126/science.abh3020 🔒) describe hominins living in what is now Israel using stone tool technologies associated to both modern humans and Neanderthals yet different two both of those lineages. These fossils have been dated to around 120,000 ti 140,000 years ago (120 - 140 kya), in the Middle Pleistocene (or MP).

Not Modern Humans or Neanderthals

The second paper states that "The evidence from Nesher Ramla demonstrates that late MP Homo fully mastered advanced Levallois technology that until only recently was linked to either H. sapiens or Neanderthals." It also mentions that this stone knapping technology was due to contact between different human groups ("cultural diffusion"), and this implies that they admixed: "These results are consistent with a growing body of genetic studies suggesting that a gene flow existed between divergent archaic Homo populations and H. sapiens during the late Middle and early Late Pleistocene. Our findings provide archaeological support for close cultural interactions between different human lineages during the Middle Paleolithic period and suggest that contacts between MP Homo and H. sapiens had already occurred prior to 120 ka."

The first paper proposes that these Middle Pleistocene hominins, which they call NR, after Nesher Ramla, the site in Israe where they were found, are distinct from both modern humans and Neanderthals. They present the following unrooted phylogenetic tree (Fig 2b) which they describe as having "NR-1 close to the origin of the branch leading to African MP Homo, close to the split from the H. erectus branch and to European MP Homo and Neanderthals (including Atapuerca SH), and far from early and recent H. sapiens".

Phylogenetic tree for the Nesher Ramla homo. Fig 2b in Hershkovitz et al., 2021

Notice how it is midway between the Eurasian Homo erectus, and the African MP hominins (like the ergaster, and H. rhodesiensis).

The authors point out that their analysis of the fossils show that they are a mossaic, with "a unique combination of archaic and Neanderthal features, supporting the existence of a local, Levantine population at the final MP... showing that an affiliation of the NR fossils with early and recent H. sapiens is highly unlikely, but that it is impossible to establish whether NR fossils are more likely to be classified as MP Homo, Neanderthal, or H. erectus (the latter for the parietal only)" So, it is different from the Homo sapiens lineage yet similar to erectus, Neanderthals or MP homo. They probabilities assigned by the study are: 41% Homo erectus, 34% MP Homo, and 25% Neanderthal.

Due to their recent age of 120 to 140 ky, the researchers suggest that they are the last survivors of an ancient Southwestern Asian homo group that could include other specimens found in the Middle East, like the Quesem and Zuttiyeh Caves individuals, and also Tabun Cavre. If this is the case they lived here between 420 and 120 ky ago. They could have admixed with the Homo sapiens of Misliya Cave, and also the Neanderthals of Skhul and Qafzeh.

They propose that the Nesher Ramla Homo is the source of the populations found in Western Europe such as the Arago and Atapuerca Sima de los Huesos (SH) specimens: "... contribution of Levantine Homo groups carrying Neanderthal-like traits to European Homo lineages. The NR Homo, carrying Neanderthal-like traits, could thus represent the “source” population... according to which Western Europe was repopulated through a series of successive migrations." The paper's bibliography cites de Castro et al., 2019, who proposed an explanation for the differences between them: "...Whereas the SH teeth present an almost morphological identity with European Neanderthals, the Arago teeth exhibit a combination of plesiomorphic as well as some Neanderthal-derived features. In addition, the Arago crown dimensions are remarkably larger than those from SH, the differences being statistically significant for most variables. We hypothesize that during the Middle Pleistocene the European continent was settled at different points in time by hominin groups coming from Southwest Asia, probably from a common mother population evolving in this latter region."

What I find interesting, is that these are Eurasian hominins, all of them, none are African. It somehow hints at a Middle Eastern origin of the population that led to Neanderthals, with a link to Homo erectus, and which is also associated with Mid Pleistocene Western European hominins like the Atapuerca Homo antecessor. The MP African hominins are not even close to these Levantine people.

The paper does not state it, but it follows logically, that modern humans could have originated in this region too.

Denisovans?

A very smart suggestion posted by John Hawks is that these Nesher Ramla people were Denisovans!

Hawks wrote: "One possibility may fit well, and I've not seen anybody mention it. We already know that there was a third population out there: the Denisovans. The DNA data from central Asia show us that Neandertal and Denisovan populations were sometimes in contact with each other, across more than 100,000 years of time, and that they mixed where they met. We do not know what the geographic range of Denisovans may have been across the southern tier of Asia. Many researchers have emphasized the Denisovans as an “eastern” population, due to the high representation of Denisovan ancestry in island southeast Asia and Oceania. But we have very little fossil evidence about the ancient populations of India and Pakistan, and the known Neandertals from Teshik-Tash, Uzbekistan and Shanidar, Iraq, are more recent than 100,000 years. So why not Denisovans in the Levant before 120,000 years ago?"

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

East Asian hominins in the Pleistocene

A paper published by Vialet, 2018 attempts to understand how modern humans settled East Asia. It reports that different "lineages" must have interacted to explain the outcome. People from the islands in South East Asia could have contributed to the final admixture, depending on variable sea levels. Vialet analyzes a scenario with "demographic “sources” and “sinks” and where repeated colonization, extinctions and recombination may help explain the morphological variability of the population." Clearly, Denisovans, possible extant archaics like Homo erectus interacted with modern humans in this region.

Vialet cites Zanolli (2013) who notes a reduction in the size of teeth, which differs from the classic Asian Homo erectus s.s. (sensu stricto) and, interestingly ntoes that "Such a degree of dental reduction, from both a morphological (i.e., molar inter-ratio, loss of main cusps) and a metric perspective has been only identified in the Middle Pleistocene sample from Sima de los Huesos, in Atapuerca" in Spain. This means that teeth became smaller and are similar to the Atapuerca hominins, similar to those of modern humans, but, they don't know why!

Atapuerca remains have provided nuclear DNA that links them to Neanderthals, however, their mitochondrial DNA placed them very close to te Denisovans.

Zanolli is at a loss when it comes to explaining this situation, and speculate that the smaller teeth may be due to "more complex scenarios envisaging frequent population interchanges (possibly from sources to sinks) and/or regional variation by isolation" and also "possible connections between Asia and Europe."

They tend to believe that this dental reduction "is more likely resulted either from replacement or introgression by admixture with continental immigrating groups" Interestingly the African Homo heidelbergensis" and the Chinsese Homo erectus as well as the early specimens from Sanigran in Indonesia share similar featues.

These articles show that Denisovans, Neanderthals, and their Spanish ancestor in Atapuerca are linked to East Asian people. Somehow, these people replaced the classic Eurasian erectus. They surely interacted with them, admixing and replacing them. The hominins living in East Asia when modern humans reached the area (or evolved there, becoming modern humans), carried the signs of Eurasian people. Where does the Out of Africa myth fit in this panorama?

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

Homo antecessor is possibly the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Modern Humans

A research paper published a few days ago, on August 3, 2026, has looked into the the microstructure of the skull of Homo antecessor,a hominin that lived in what is now Spain, 800,000 to 900,000 years ago.

The article, Parietal thickness and Homo antecessor: A description of three new fragments from Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, Spain🔒, by Gallareto-Sande, Bruner, Saladié, and Martinó,n-Torres focuses on the similarities of the bone structure of H. antecessor and Neanderthals, and H. sapiens.

The authors note that although it had initially been "proposed as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans based on a combination of derived facial features and primitive postcranial and dental traits" later studies suggested it was a branch or "stem" within our clade.

According to Phys.org the paper found that the the "total cranial vault thickness of these adult individuals falls within the range observed in modern humans and Neanderthals and is clearly lower than that found in Homo erectus and other early Pleistocene hominins."

The sample used bones from four adult individuals which were analyzed using computer microtomography. This allowed the researchers to study each layer of the bone structure. Though they caution that the sample is small, the layer knwon as diplo%ë on the inner side of the bone is very similar, in its thickness to that of humans and Neanderthals. Howver, the outer and inner layers show differences between antecessor and Neanderthals and humans, they are slightly thinner and thicker, respectively, than theirs. Even so, they are very unlike those of the other hominins like Homo erectus and the African species.

The paper does not say so, but it makes me wonder if this European hominin evolved there, in situ, from older erectus populations, and is, in fact, the Last Common Ancestors of Modern Humans and the Neanderthal-Denisovan lineages. See my post about this possibility, and also this post, and this post.

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

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

Homo heidelbergensis from Africa and Denisovans are linked

A research paper published in 2025 (Candidate Denisovan fossils identified through gene regulatory phenotyping, by Nadav Mishol, Gadi Herzlinger, Yoel Rak, Uzy Smilanksy, Liran Carmel, David Gokhman, bioRxiv 2024.04.18.590145; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.18.590145 and in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences doi: 10.1073/pnas.2513968122) reported the study of the shape of different skulls from the Middle Pleistocene, spanning Eurasian and African specimens, including Neanderthal, Homo erectus and modern humans to try to identify the traits that indicate the Denisovan morphology. The study found something quite interesting besides the similarity between Denisovans and some East Asian fossils, below I cite their conclusions and highlight the relevant part:

"these analyses revealed that the East Asian specimens of Harbin and Dali show an exceptionally high concordance with the Denisovan profile, surpassing all other examined Middle Pleistocene hominin specimens, including Neanderthals. Specifically, 15 out of 18 of Dali’s features and 16 out of 18 of Harbin’s matched Denisovan predictions. These findings are robust to overall skull size and to correlations between phenotypes. We also found that Kabwe 1 shows a strong affinity to the Denisovan–Neanderthal clade and might be placed near its root"

Kabwe the African fossil

Kabwe 1 was unearthed in 1921 in Kabwe, in what is now Zambia. It is a fossil skull also known as the Rhodesia man or Broken Hill, and has been classified as a member of the Homo heidelbergensis group. It is rather primitive, with heavy brow ridges, and a flat forehead, its shape resembles that of Homo erectus yet it is relatively recent, dated to around 324,000 - 274,000 years old (source) which makes it contemporaneous with the first members of our species, Homo sapiens who are said to have appeared in North Africa 300,000 years ago.

Besides the oddity of archaic and moderns co-existing in Africa 300 kya. Kabwe 1 is extremely close to Denisovans! Which is an unusual finding because Denisovans are not known to have migrated into Africa, they are better known as East or Southeast, or Central Asian populations that admixed over there with modern humans as these entered that region around 50 ky ago.

Let's see what the paper has to say about this similarity:

"Several test subjects, most notably Kabwe 1, exhibit unexpectedly high concordance with the Denisovan profile, despite being unlikely to be Denisovans. Although discovered in Africa, Kabwe 1 not only aligns well with the Denisovan profile (Fig. 4) but also clusters closely in the PCA with Dali, a potential Denisovan (Fig. 6 and SI Appendix, Fig. S3). Although our current knowledge of Denisovan habitat is lacking, it is unlikely that they reached Southern Africa. Hence, Kabwe 1 is unlikely to be directly positioned on the Denisovan lineage. A more plausible explanation is that the resemblance of some of these specimens to Denisovans reflects a proximal phylogenetic affinity with the Neanderthal–Denisovan clade, perhaps close to its root."

So, the authors assume that there has been no migration of Denisovans into Africa, and based on this assumption they suggest that the African fossil is similar to Denisovans because it was a close relative to the Denisovan-Neanderthal group that left Africa, and split into Neanderthals and Denisovans. A conclusion repeated again in the closing part of the paper, as you can read below:

"The resemblance of several specimens attributed to H. heidelbergensis to the Denisovan profile, and specifically the African specimen Kabwe 1, is particularly intriguing. The similarity between Kabwe 1 and other high-scoring specimens is evident in all PCAs (Figure 4 and Supplementary Figure 10), suggesting that this resemblance is not limited to Denisovan-like phenotypes. Despite our limited knowledge of the true range of Denisovans, it is unlikely that they reached Southern Africa, hence Kabwe 1 is unlikely to be directly positioned on the Denisovan lineage. A more plausible explanation is that the resemblance of some of these specimens to Denisovans reflects a proximal phylogenetic affinity with Denisovans. For example, H. heidelbergensis specimens were positioned either close to the split between modern and archaic humans or close to the split between Neanderthals and Denisovans [29]. If H. heidelbergensis is indeed phylogenetically closer to the Neanderthal-Denisovan split than Neanderthals are, it is expected to exhibit an even greater similarity to the Denisovan profile than Neanderthals do. Another alternative explanation is that Denisovans might have retained several ancestral phenotypes observed in H. heidelbergensis [59], or that these phenotypes were affected by gene flow into Denisovans, originating from contemporaneous H. heidelbergensis [17]."

The authors don't explain how the African fossil can be closer to the Denisovans than the Neanderthals. It is assumed that neither group entered Africa. That the common ancestor of Denisovans and Neanderthals left Africa, splitting from the group that would lead to us, modern humans. Then, in Eurasia, the ancestral group of Denisovans and Neanderthals split into two species, one heading East, the other colonizing the West of Eurasia. So, how could a primitive hominin in Zambia be closer to a group that split in the Levant?

The second explanation requires explaining why the Denisovans ended up with the primitive ancestral form found in Kabwe but not the Neanderthals. The final explanation of gene flow into Denisovans via contemporaneous Homo heidelbergensis would require them being alive and kicking in Western Eurasia around 600 ky ago!

The nice part of this paper is that it is thought provoking: Denisovans and Homo heidelbergensis are linked. Notice that Heidelbergensis got its name from a site in Heidelberg, Germany where it was found in 1908 (source). It is found in Europe and Africa. Of course, it is claimed to have evolved in Africa. But, could these people have evolved in Eurasia, leading to the ancestor of modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals, adding more genes to the Denisovans who carried them east, and finally, a group of heidelbergensis moved into Africa resulting in the Zambia fossils?

The current bias against an Into Africa flow makes this hypothesis unlikely to be accepted. But it seems the most logical one. Furthermore, flow of the heidelbergensis into Atapuerca people and then from Spain into North Africa seems a plausible explanation for the evolution of Modern Humans separately from the Neanderthal-Denisovan group.

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

Neanderthals treated a tooth cavity 59,000 years ago

Although this post has nothing to do with the main theme of my blog, I decided to include it because it gives us a glimpse of the intelligence and humanity of Neanderthals. They were not lumbering semi-human brutes. They were human beings, just like us, with a brain and a mind similar to ours. In this post I will comment about a very recent publication about how a Neanderthal from the Chagyrskaya site in the Altai region of Siberia 59,000 years ago, perforated a molar to relieve the pain caused by a caries. The oldest example of dentistry on record.

The paper is the following: Zubova AV, Zotkina LV, Olsen JW, Kulkov AM, Moiseyev VG, Malyutina AA, et al. (2026) Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals. PLoS One 21(5): e0347662. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347662

Over the years, there have been studies (the links lead to the research that backs these statements) that suggest that the Neanderthal buried their dead, and took care of their elders and injured companions, disabled (Down syndrome) and, mended those that were sick. This implies some kind of elevated mental function, and compassion.

In this paper the authors analyzed a molar (one located on the lower left side of the mouth) which had a large man-made hole bored into it (see image) this hole was made while the individual was alive, and the person survived after it was done. It was perforated by using a stone "perforator" that drilled or rotated against the enamel of the tooth to reach the inner pulp and relieve the pain caused by the caries with "severe pulp exposure." This procedure was done without any type of anesthesia, and would have taken (based on the experiments conducted by the researchers) between 10 minutes and two and a half hours, but they point out that "the individual would have had little choice: remove the dentin or face potentially fatal consequences."

Fig 2. Chagyrskaya 64 molar tooth and its macro-features. 1 General view of the tooth in five projections; a–c. Macro-photographs of the crown’s occlusal surface features: a. superior view of the concavity; b. stepped groove on the concavity’s wall; .
From Zubova et al., 2026

The authors point out that the procedure required "... two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements, indicates that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention. These patterns bring Neanderthal behavior closer to modern humans and differentiate that behavior from the instinctive actions of other primates."

Interestingly, the enamel thickness on Neanderthal teeth is thinner than in human teeth, meaning that it is easier to perforate it and reach the pulp than in modern humans. The edges and walls of the perforation are smooth and rounded suggesting that the individual was alive during the procedure and that lived after it, using the tooth. The authors wondered if the hole had been filled with wax, resin, bitumen, tree sap or antiseptic herbs to serve as painkillers but a Raman spectroscopical test did not reveal the presence of other materials.

Yes, it must have been a painful intervention, and the aftermath was also painful as it resulted in " complete pulp exposure. On the one hand, this could have caused pain for some time; on the other hand, pulp exposure would have accelerated nerve destruction, after which the pain should have disappeared." Was it done by chance? or did these people know how to treat a caries?

The paper concludes that this molar "offers new insights into Neanderthal self-regulation, revealing their capacity for deliberate, sustained actions that required enduring pain – a behavior not documented in other higher primates, which typically rely on instinctive responses. While genetic evidence confirms that Neanderthals exhibited heightened pain sensitivity compared to Homo sapiens, their ability to engage in goal-directed behaviors involving pain tolerance suggests advanced volitional control. It can be argued, therefore, that Neanderthals exhibited volitional strategic goal-setting behaviors that may have aligned more closely with those of Homo sapiens than with non-human primates... challenging traditional distinctions in cognitive archaeology between anatomically archaic and modern members of Homo sapiens and highlighting their shared legacy of biological and cultural adaptations."

Closing Comments

Neanderthal were smart, compassionate, and human. By the way, the earliest Homo sapiens dental intervention discovered to date was in an individual from 14,160 to 13,820 years ago, who lived in Ripari Villabruna in Italy. This person shows evidence of enamel scraping on a caries more of a toothpicking procedure rather than a drilling one.

One can hardly imagine the pain suffered by countless generations of human beings before the discovery of analgesics and anesthesia. We are fortunate to live in the present time! I recall the scene in the movie "Castaway" (2000) where Tom Hanks, stranded on a desert island, in terrible pain due to an untreated toothache that he had prior to his trip that led him to the island, does away with the tooth using a rock as a hammer and the blade of an ice skate as a chisel, passing out after the procedure.

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

2011 Neanderthal sightings in Kemerovo Siberia

Iwas watching a program on History channel that offered different explanations for the Himalayan Yeti (abominable snowman) such as its a bear, its a relict Gigantopithecus ape, its the footprints of deformed human feet, its imagination (Brocken spectre, pareidolia, or a shadow person), and finally, it mentioned some sightings of extant Neanderthals reported in the Kemerovo region of Siberia around 2011-2012, and investigated by Russian scholars. Which is indeed a new alternative,in line with what I have written about on the ancient Patagonian myths of "wild men" (sightings of surviving ancestral hominins in America). For these reasons, I decided to post about it, and look into these sightings and the scientists and organizations that are studying them.

The Kemerovo Sightings

An article published online in 2011 mentions a spike in sightings of the abominable snowman in Siberia in the Kemerovo region noting that it is 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Moscow, and neighboring Altai (a place where Denisovans and Neanderthals lived for several hundreds of thousands of years, and overlapped there, admixing).

The article mentions an "International Centre of Hominology in Tashtagol, and cites its head, Igor Burtsev (his name was also cited in the History Channel documentary). Burtsey stated that: "When Homo sapiens started populating the world, it viciously exterminated its closest relative in the hominid family, Homo neanderthalensis. Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes."

Kemerovo is indeed close to Altai (see Google map), roughly 580 km (360 mi) north of the famous Denisova Cave.

Another article describes the sightings: one took place near a village called Misky (see map), where a fisherman called Vitaly Vershinin, who was sailing up the river, saw what he believed to be two people with a bear-like appearance drinking by a river, but when they saw him, they stood up, and walked away, so did he. The man, took a TV crew to the spot, and added that ""they just rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making way through the bushes with two other limbs, straight up the hill, right there."

Some "yeti" hairs were found by an expedition in Kemerovo conducted by Burtsev the previous year (2011), who said that despite the violent interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals "Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes. No clothing on them, no tools in hands and no fire in the household. Only round-the-clock watchfulness for a Homo sapiens around." I disagree. Neanderthals were sophisticated people, they knew how to make specializeds stone tools, dominated the art of firemaking, and fashioned clothes to protect themselves from the harsh Ice Age climate during the period they thrived in Eurasia, for several hundreds of thousands of years.

I posted about these sightings in 2011 and was looking forward to the outcome of the DNA tests of the tufts of hair recovered in Kemerovo. But these were never disclosed.

The article continues, and also mentions that "Sightings of the creatures in the region have increased three-fold over the past 20 years, prompting scientists at Moscow's Darwin Museum to speculate that there may be a small population of these creatures." (Neanderthals).

Another sighting took place in January 2013 (Source) when a state inspector spotted a yeti in the Shorsky National Park in the Tashtagolski district (see map). A local official, Sergei Adlyakov, said that it didn't look like a bear and vanished in the forest snapping branches off the bushes as it fled.

The final report of an encounter with yetis took plaxe in Kuzbass, when men on a boat navigating the Mras-Su River (see map) spotted, on a rock above the river, "some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs."

A 2014 post quotes Igor Burtsev as affirming that "there is an active population of about 30 of the creatures living in the Kemerovo (the region of Mount Shoria) in Siberia to this day"

The "Yeti Expert"

Who is Igor Burtsev? and what is the International Centre of Hominology?

Burtsev is co-author of a research paper about a wild woman that was captured in a forest in the Caucasus (Margaryan A, Sinding MS, Carø C, Yamshchikov V, Burtsev I, Gilbert MTP. The genomic origin of Zana of Abkhazia. Adv Genet (Hoboken). 2021 Jun 14;2(2):e10051. doi: 10.1002/ggn2.10051. PMID: 36618122; PMCID: PMC9744565), in the paper he is credited as affiliated to the " International Center of Hominology, State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia." This museum is a serious institution (website).

The paper cites some refrences authored by Burtsev:

• Bourtsev I. A Skeleton Still Buried and a Skull Unearthed: the Story of Zana. In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Crypto‐Logos Publishers 1996;46–52.
• Burtsev I. Relict Hominoid Research Seminar. 1987.
• Burtsev I. Moscow Naturalists' Society. 1987.

Burtsev has appeared in some episodes of documentaries about cryptozoology (Cascade Bigfoot Blood Mystery, 2022, and in The Proof is Out There, 2025: Bigfoot Car Chase, Airport UFO, and High School Football Ghost, S.5;Ep. 12 and Siberian Yeti, Amazonian Alien Researcher, and Japanese Wolves Resurrected, S.5; Ep. 14.

A Russian language article states that Burtsev holds a History pHD, but then quotes him as supporting the weird theory put forward by Dr. Melba Ketchum (see my 2012 post about this quack story), who analyzed the DNA of North American samples of Bigfoots. Burtsev says that " It's been absolutely certain that the creature wasn't related to Neanderthals or Denisovans... Besides, 15,000 years ago, representatives of these human species had already disappeared from the face of the Earth—they went extinct... I don't rule out a hypothesis that might seem completely fantastic. Aliens who visited Earth could have been involved in the hybridization. Very unusual DNA was found in the samples analyzed in the United States." When UFOs and aliens are combined in a story involving Bigfoot, it becomes pseudoscience, and therefore placed in the same category as astrology, flat earth, creation science, Bermuda Triangle and similar nonsense.

I found his bio on the ICH website (more on ICH further down):

"Igor Burtsev, born in 1940, candidate of historical sciences, publisher, president of the Cryptosphere Fund for furthering scientific searches and explorations, director of the International Center of Hominology. Engaged in this investigation since 1965, participant and leader of many searching expeditions – in the North Caucasus (Kabardino-Balkaria, 1965), Azerbajan (Talysh, 1970-75), Abkhazia (1971, 1975, 1978, 2004, 2008), Mongolia (1976), Pamiro-Alai (1979-82), the Murmansk Region (Lovozero Lake, 1990); participant of investigations near St. Petersburg (1989, 2009) and in the Kirov Region (2002-2007), in the Novgorod, Tver’, Tula, Krasnodar regions (2009), in the Mountaneus Shoria, Siberia (2009-10). Since 1971 devoted several years to the study of the Patterson film. Author and co-author of many publications in the popular scientific magazines and in newspapers. In the fall of 2004 spent five weeks in Tennessee, USA, investigating reports of bigfoots visiting the Carter Farm. In 2006 visited the New York University concerning the analysis of the skulls excavated in Abkhasia."

International Centre of Hominology or ICH

Burtsev in collaboration with Bayanov (more on him below) created the International Center of Hominology in Moscow in 2003 (Source). Both are pictured below.

The ICH is listed in the Union of International Associations (link here) as a civil entity.

The UIA gives a website address for the ICH: https://hominology.narod.ru/eng.htm which is offline, however, the website can be seen in archive.org (a great tool, it has captured and saved one trillion web pages!), below is a screenshot of ICH's website as it looked back in 2013, when it was active.

ICH website in 2013, archive.org, Internet Archive Wayback Machine

ICH has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hominology which is currently active.

More on the Eurasian Hominoids

An interesting thesis exploring Soviet science and Darwinism touches the subject of hominoids and the Yeti. It mentions that these scholars believed that the Yeti was a missing link, a relict hominoid, but which one, was an open discussion. somt thought it was related to apes, like the gigantopithcus, while others like Boris Porshnev supported a hominin like the Homo erectus or a Neanderthal, and Petr Smolin thought it was an australopitecine. After deep studies of physical evidence, Porshnev "concluded that Yeti and Neanderthal shared too many traits to be incidental" yet the Yeti was an animal, it degenerated from the intelligent Neanderthal in a backward evolution. This seems to explain why Burtsev suggests that the Neanderthals in Siberia don't make stone tools, don't wear clothes or don't light fires, they are a reversion to an animal form, yet shaped like humans.

In my search about these Siberian sightings, I also came across the work of Dimitri Bayanov, who is the Science Director in the International Centre of Hominology. He is credited with coining the term "hominology" as the study of "hairy bipeds" like bigfoot, almasty, and yeti. For over 30 years he has headed the Smolin seminar focused on hominology at the Darwin Museum in Moscow.

In his essay, Bayanov Historical Evidence for the Existence of Relict Hominoids (The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 1:23-50, 2012) where he addresses the issue of which hominin has survived and embodies the current hominoids sighted in Eurasia:

"One final relevant question: How to correlate relict hominoids with the fossil record of paleoanthropology? According to Krantz (1980), Neanderthals had more traits in common with Homo erectus than with Homo sapiens, so that they “could all be classed with erectus.” He also wrote: “Homo erectus existed for over a million years with relatively little change – a kind of evolutionary plateau – and then was transformed rather quickly into Homo sapiens” (Krantz, 1980). Could it be that today’s wild bipedal homins are relicts of that evolutionary “standstill,” which lasted long enough for them to penetrate and settle the Old World before the advent of Homo sapiens? Adapting to local environments, these pre-sapiens must have more or less departed in their physique from the fossil erectus-grade forms presently known to science. I therefore propose that homins reported in central Eurasia are relicts of the Homo erectus-Neanderthal stage of evolution."

Closing Comments

The idea that surviving Neanderthals, Denisovans, or even Homo erectus have inspired the stories of wild men, or similar hominoids is exciting. It is extremely unlikely yet possible that in the vast wilderness of the Siberian hinterland there are a handful of our ancestors still living in the stone age. The same could apply to South America, or North America. But we need serious science to sift facts from pseudoscientific rubbish (like alien hybrids and similar nonsense).

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

Jinsitai Cave China - Neanderthal tools 40 kya

In yesterday's post about the habitats of Neanderthals and Denisovans where I mentioned a lone outpost of Neanderthals in Northeastern China known as Jinsitai Cave, I recalled that I wrote a short post about it back in 2019. Today we will revisit this spot, and learn what else has been discovered and published about it.

Originally described by Feng Li et al., in 2018 (Li, F., Kuhn, S. L., Chen, F., Wang, Y., Southon, J., Peng, F., Shan, M., Wang, C., Ge, J., Wang, X., Yun, T., & Gao, X. (2018). The easternmost Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) from Jinsitai Cave, North China. Journal of Human Evolution, 114, 76–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2017.10.004). These researchers found similarities between the tools found at Jintai and those from Altai (3,000 km or nearly 1870 mi. west). This could imply that there was a cultural bond between people living in both locations, or that they were the same group. The tools themselves resembled the Mousterian technology used by Neanderthals in Western Eurasia. Were they made by Neanderthals? They could have also been made by Denisovans or even modern humans.

No definite Neanderthal remains have been found in Eastern Asia, but the tools found at Jinsitai are Mousterian-like. They were dated to around 45,000 years ago (47-42 ky) which is relatively recent. At that time modern humans had already left Africa and had spread across Eurasia. The Neanderthals used an older Middle Paleolithic stone knapping technique while modern humans had newer, Upper Paleolithic industries.

They lived there until around 39,000 years ago (40-37 ky) and moved on, or were replaced by others.

The cave itself is located in northern China, close to the border with Mongolia. (35°14'23.4" N, 115°28'32.7" E), see it in Google Maps.

First excavated in 2000-2001 and described by Wang et al. 2010, who found 5,000 tools, but dug up almost the whole cave, disturbing most of its sediments. Wang reported that there were different layers showing distinct stone tools: "Three cultural layers come down in one continuous line. The Lower cultural stratum is dominated by the Small Tool Industry. A lot of cobble tools and Levallois tools are found in the Middle cultural stratum. The Microblade Industry in Upper cultural stratum is superior to the Small Tool Industry, according to the tool types, retouched technique and selected raw materials." Howver Feng Li says that the information was limited, and the dig used poor methods. So they went back to reassess the site. Some of the tools that were unearthed are shown below.

Jinsitai stone tools

Another paper, by Wang et al., 2023 mentions that "the upper layers contained a Late Upper Palaeolithic assemblage of microblades and bifacially thinned points, alongside the traditional core-and-flake (small flakes) industry which is typical in contemporaneous sites in northern China. The lower layers were dominated by core-and-flake industry, while some distinctive Levallois flakes were described as Mousterian-like artefacts. Some researchers regard the presence of this Mousterian-like industry at Jinsitai as evidence of a population dispersal or technological diffusion from the west."

This study focused on dating animal bones and confirmed that the bone collagen and radiocarbon show that humans occupied the site starting around 47,000 to 44,000 years ago, and continued there until the Holocene. They found camel bones, dated to 37-20 ky BP an unusual species, showing that humans not only hunted larger prey like mammoths, but also mid-sized animals.

Recent research by Khatsenovich et al., 2023 describes a site where Middle Paleolithic tools were found, located in in southern Mongolia. It is the Tsagaan Agui Cave in the Gobi Altai Mountains (44°42'53.3" N, 101°10'13.4" E, see it in Google Maps). The authors report that "Preliminary technological and typological analyses reveal the non-Levallois Mousterian character of the Middle Paleolithic industry at Tsagaan Agui Cave" this is a lithic industry that is characteristic of Neanderthals, who created it 300 ky ago. The Tsagaan Agui cave is ~1000 km west (660 mi) from Jinsitai, and roughly the same distance from Denisova Cave, which is further west, in the Altai (1200 km - 740 mi)

This, together with other findings published in 2025 (see my post Neanderthals in China 55 ky ago) show that the human landscape in Eastern Asia was dynamic at the time that the first people reached America. 40,000 years ago, modern humans were walking across Siberia and we have the Tianyuan remains (40 ky) and Ust'Ishim man (45 ky) date from this period. It is concievable that Neanderthals had been living in China for hundreds of thousands of years, and that they could have advanced northeast to Beringia and into America.

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

Neanderthals, Denisovans, territory and admixture

Icame across an interesting map while browsing the Internet, it shows the habitats where Denisovans and Neanderthals could have lived in Eurasia. Mind you, habitats or ecological regions suitable for them, which does not necessarily mean that they lived in this whole territory. It also found overlapping areas where both populations could have met, and exchanged genes.

The paper was published in 2023: Jiaoyang Ruan et al., Climate shifts orchestrated hominin interbreeding events across Eurasia. Science 381, 699-704 (2023). DOI:10.1126/science.add4459.

Neanderthal-Denisovan habitat overlap (dotted area). Fig 2 A in Ruan et al.

Denisovans and Neanderthals coexisted in Eurasia from around 400 ky ago to 30 ky ago. They met and mixed several times. This paper looked into the climate and how it altered their habitat forcing them to move east, west, north and south as it worsened or improved during the Ice Ages.

The paper points out the different enviornments each group lived in: "Both Neanderthals and Denisovans are simulated to have lived primarily in environments characterized by annual temperature, precipitation, and NPP of ~−10° to 20°C, ~500 to 1300 mm/year, and ~200 to 800 g of carbon per square meter per year, respectively. Yet, compared to Neanderthals, Denisovans were present in hot and humid climates, which points to a comparatively wider niche space. Whereas Neanderthals were more abundant in temperate forests, Denisovans were present in both boreal forest and tundra." Denisovans lived in Southeast Asia, but fossil preservation in that area is poor, so no remains have been found, but there are genetic markers of Denisovans in the modern humans living in that region, the Phillipines and Papua New Guinea.

During the marine isotope stage (MIS) 5 around 135-105 kya, the Neanderthals spread into Northeastern and Central Europe, and further east into Southern Siberia. During the cold glacial maximum periods, they retreatedinto refugia in Southern Europe and around the north of the Black Sea. The authors suggest that these differnt habitats during the glaical and interglacial periods can explain the divergence of Neanderthal haplogroups, and their split (See my post on Western and Eastern Neanderthals Were Very Divergent).

Regarding Denisovans, the paper finds that due "to glacial cooling, Denisovan habitats vanish in Scandinavia, mildly increase in its core areas from eastern Europe to Siberia, and show massive fragmentation in Asia."

Where did they interbreed?

In a previous post, I wondered where did Denisovans and Neanderthals admix, Ruan et al. answer that question: Both species overlapped for around 400,000 years and there were hotspots like the Altai region where Denisova cave is found, occupied by Neanderthals and Denisovans (yellow star in map above). The authors find that there were six interbreeding episodes between the two groups: "the five younger events cluster during the warm MIS 5, whereas the oldest event, although with considerable dating uncertainty, occurs in the cooler MIS 6. Because some of these events occurred thousands of years earlier than the fossil dates, they could have happened in places far away from the places where the specimens were found. Our simulation of Neanderthal-Denisovan overlap suggests that these MIS 5 interbreeding events took place in central-southern Siberia... By contrast, the MIS 6 event likely happened in eastern Europe."

They note that there was "bidirectional gene flow" between both groups in Siberia. And that European Neanderthals don't have signs of admixture suggesting the Denisovans didn't mingle with them in Europe, however, they also point out that "large-sample genetic analyses have recently revealed Denisovan ancestry in modern European populations in France and in Iceland, which suggests the possibility for more widespread and prevalent interbreeding than previously thought. These results are consistent with our model simulations, which indicate the presence of suitable Denisovan habitats in Europe under optimal orbital conditions" It isn't clear if they suggest that Denisovans intereacted with modern humans in Europe, or with Neanderthals who later admixed with modern humans. Another option is that Eastern Siberian modern humans picked up their Denisovan genes there, and then moved into Europe later, carrying them with them.

I did find interesting the extended Neanderthal habitat, reaching into Central, Western, and Eastern Africa, India, Korea, Eastern China, Southern Mongolia, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco. Not so long ago, Neanderthals had been confined to Western Europe and the Middle East. Now we see them spread across Eurasia. This has many interesting implications.

The paper also included a map with sites where Denisovan and Neanderthal remains have been found the caption reads: "Neanderthal and Denisovan locations and their corresponding climate and biome conditions. (A) Hominin fossil, archaeological, and genetic data compiled for HSMs; candidate Denisovans (dashed circle)". I reproduced it below.

The lonely brown circle on the right side of the map, is the easternmost Neanderthal outpost in Eastern Asia (in the map above) is Jinsitai Cave, North China. We will look into it in my next post.

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