It all started a 1958 day when some peasants from the province of Guangdong in China were collecting guano of bat in a cave and noticed something unusual: bone remains that looked like a human skull. They warned local researchers, who cataloged the piece and baptized it with the name of the nearest people, Mabaand the number ‘1’. When did this be live? At some point in the period between 130,000 and 300,000 years ago, and the big question to answer was to what extent It was our ancestor.
A recent study already has the answer. More or less.
The ‘Chinese Neanderthal’. You will be wondering how such an extremely open temporal fan is handled, and the answer is that it is complex to perform a more precise dating due to complexity of both the site in which it was found and the features of Maba 1.
At first, the specimen was nicknamed as’ the Chinese Neanderthal‘Due to cranial similarities with that species, but other studies have dismantled that hypothesis, bringing it closer to homo.
It does not fit. But there was still a problem: facial similarities and microtomography analysis rule out that it was a neanderthal, yes, but it is not fully fits with a Homo erectus or with the Homo sapiens. Either with those Denisovanosand the problem is that it can be many things.
Facial features, such as nasal prominence, brings Maba 1 to Neanderthals, but the neurocranium It has similarities with Homo Heidelbergensis and Homo Erectus. However, the cranial volume is comparable to that of modern humans and everything adds to a set that is very different from other Chinese fossils of the Pleistocene.
Summary: We have no idea. Seeking to learn more about him, the authors of A new study carried out by researchers from the Institute of Paleontology and Paleantropology of Vertebrates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed the cranial cavity, the diplus vessels and the rest of the internal structures of the skull. Using the technique of tomography, researchers discovered that MABA 1 does not belong to a single class: it belongs to many.
And the truth is that it is not so strange to find hominids of this period that they do not fit completely into established categories. No, it is not a “lost link”, at least not in the most colloquial sense, but it seems to be an individual belonging to those cases than They blur the limits between different species human
3D reconstruction of the skull for study
But it teaches us something. This whole case reminds me of the episode of ‘The Simpsons‘In which Lisa finds the skeleton of an’ angel ‘and takes a piece to the local archaeologist to investigate it. After the evidence (which we later knew he did not make), his conclusion was that the results were not conclusive. With Maba 1 something similar happens, but it does leave us an important lesson.
The researchers comment that “the internal structures of MABA 1 show a combination of morphological characteristics found in several species. And these findings further evidenced the high morphological variability among Asian hominids in the middle pleistocene.” In fact, Maba 1 is a perfect example of that complexity in the human evolution that we commented, since the mixture of features reminds other contemporary fossils found … in Africa.
Researchers are clear that “currently, it cannot be definitively classified in any known hominid taxon”, but also that it remains a key fossil to understand the diversity of the hominids of the Middle Pleistocene in Asia. At the moment, it is not a Neanderthal and, now, we also know that it is a “no erectus.” We will see what happens in future investigations, but Maba 1 is not unique.
Images | Ryan Somma, Mankuen
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