![]() The well-known impact event is often linked to the decimation of non-avian dinosaurs, which ushered in the rise of mammals. Very few dinosaur bones date to the final few thousand years before the impact, so having a dinosaur that could be direct evidence to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction would be astounding, per the BBC. "Vast areas of Africa and southeast Asia have still not produced a single ancient bone or skull," Stringer said, "though stone tools show people were there, and the whole Indian subcontinent has only one significant ancient human fossil so far.Paleontologists claim to have found a fossilized leg belonging to a dinosaur that may have perished when an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, reports BBC's Jonathan Amos. In order to fully understand how our human species evolved, mixed with others and moved around the world, more research needs to be done, Stringer said. Rivera, a biological anthropologist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that "with few fossils available for study in previous decades, scientists could not grasp the degree of variation we now see dated to the Middle Pleistocene." This Hualongdong fossil may hint that our evolution was more gradual and nuanced than previously thought, Rivera said, and that "we are uncovering only snippets of that evolutionary history." New human species 'Dragon man' may be our closest relative Unknown lineage of ice age Europeans discovered in genetic study 86,000-year-old human bone found in Laos cave hints at 'failed population' from prehistory "The data presented suggest a distinctive combination of features that supports the idea of a third human lineage in China, not sapiens nor Neanderthal," he told Live Science in an email. This means that the Hualongdong individuals could be related to Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans, or could be another lineage entirely.Ĭhris Stringer, research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in this study, said that the skull and mandible are very interesting, but he does not think HLD 6 is closely related to Homo sapiens. ![]() "The HLD 6 mandible exhibits a mosaic pattern with some features commonly found in Middle Pleistocene archaic hominins, Late Pleistocene anatomically modern humans, and recent modern humans," the researchers wrote in the study.Įven though HLD 6 has modern human-like features in their facial bones, their lower jaw has a more complicated set of traits that match the diversity within the human lineage in the Middle Pleistocene. However, the fossil lacked some other features of chins, leading the researchers to conclude that the ancient teen did not have one. HLD 6 had several features that suggest the teen had a chin - one of the hallmarks of modern humans. Xiujie Wu and Wu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues took two dozen measurements of HLD 6's mandible and compared them to 83 other known fossil hominins using a technique called geometric morphometrics, which uses statistics to compare 3D shapes generated by the measurements. ![]() They presented their findings in a research article published July 31 in the Journal of Human Evolution. After discovering a new fragment of the mandible - the lower jaw - of HLD 6 in December 2020, researchers examined and reconstructed the bone for further analysis. ![]()
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