I said in a post the other day that I am largely unsympathetic to arguments for excessive speciation throughout the Pleistocene. The news this week from “Red Deer Cave” or Longlin Cave in SW China does not change that. These discoveries (actually documentation of fossils recovered in 1979) have gotten a lot of attention in the news media, and I am a little baffled. As an example, The New Scientist story on the PLOSone paper describing the fossils is titled, “Chinese human fossils unlike any known species.” But they are. They are like recent modern humans from East Asia. Something the paper’s analysis also seems to strongly suggest. Here are two photos of LL1 (on the right) alongside a late Pleistocene/Holocene skull from the Upper Cave of Zhoukoudian, another Chinese fossil locality (on the left).
I should caution that these photos are necessarily not to scale, my attempt is only to highlight relative similarity. But much of the variation above parallels the kind of variation we see between male (on the left) and female (on the right) modern human crania.
In this second photo I have highlighted several regions of the maxillary/zygomatic that appear, based on the picture, to have fractures which potentially disrupt the reconstruction. I highlight these, because in the paper’s analysis, it is measurements that focus heavily on this part of the skull that provide the primary metric argument for this specimen being anything other than an early modern human skull from East Asia.
I am open to ideas about high levels of population structure and complex and changing regional population dynamics and the more fossil evidence we have to demonstrate this complexity late in the Pleistocene the better. But I am skeptical of quotes like this:
“These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the Ice Age around 11,000 years ago,” says Professor Curnoe.
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1. Curnoe D , Xueping J , Herries AIR , Kanning B , Taçon PSC , et al. (2012) Human Remains from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition of Southwest China Suggest a Complex Evolutionary History for East Asians. PLoS ONE 7(3): e31918. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031918
Those cheeks remind me of Kow Swamp a little bit. Also the Captcha below wants me to type the word “blood.” which is a bit unsettling.
Thanks for this insight. I was since the beginning thinking that the guy (is a “he” right?) looks just modern with a very peculiar zygomatic bone and a very small nose. I speculated that the bone may be a deviation towards exaggeration in the overall process of coalescence of the modern Mongoloid phenotype, specially after I found a somewhat comparable individual among early Americans, Peñón woman, who also has an unusually oversized cheekbone.
Your mention about all other metrics fitting in with modern East Asians, really gives much more certainty in that evaluation. It should have been something that the authors checked from the very beginning, IMHO: how did the skull worked after removing the very unusual cheekbone measure?