Scientists may have discovered a new human species this week for the second time.
Anthropologists in France have found a 45,000-year-old baby pelvic bone that doesn’t match Neanderthals or Homo sapiens.
The hip bone was found with the remains of 11 Neanderthals in the Grotte du Renne cave, later inhabited by anatomically modern humans (AMHs), suggesting the child lived alongside the now-extinct species.
The artifact was compared to two Neanderthals and 32 modern baby bones, and found that its shape was different from both species — but slightly closer to AMHs.
“We propose that this is due to it belonging to an early modern human lineage whose morphology differs somewhat from present-day humans,” the team wrote in the study published in Nature.
The news comes as a separate study revealed that an ancient skull that belonged to a child who lived in China up to 300,000 years ago may also belong to a new human species.
A 45,000-year-old pelvic bone found in France may belong to a previously unknown lineage of Homo sapiens that lived before modern humans walked the Earth
The fossilized remains, including a jaw, skull and leg bones, were discovered in Hualongdong, China in 2019.
What baffled experts, however, is that the individual’s facial features didn’t match the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, Denisovans, or us, leading them to suspect we may be missing a branch of the human family tree.
And this is what the latest discovery has revealed.
AMHs appeared in Western Europe about 42,000 years ago, 2,000 years before Neanderthals went extinct.
The Grotte du Renne cave is a site where both species lived during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, but has provided evidence that Neanderthals evolved aspects of modern behavior before coming into contact with modern humans.
Layers of soil in the cave provide a timeline for when Neanderthals lived in the cave and when AMHs took over the site, but a middle layer was home to the small pelvic bone suggesting another lineage also lived in the structure.
The bone belonged to a baby and was uncovered in the Grotte du Renne cave, which was first inhabited by Neanderthals before our ancestors moved in
The baby bone was found on a level with 11 Neanderthal remains.
This level is known as the Châtelperron techno-cultural complex, which existed 45,000 to 40,000 years ago and was followed by Mousterian industry.
The Châtelperronian was an era when stone tools and flint knives would have been a pivotal point in Neanderthal evolution — though some scholars believe early humans made the pieces.
The baby’s pelvic bone was found to have a very different curvature than the immature Neanderthal bones, but was just slightly removed from the AHM’s pelvic bone.
The team said the mysterious artifact was in the samples of modern humans.
This overlap could therefore indicate a variability of iliac (the hip bone) curvature shared between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the study reads.
The researchers suggested that the child was likely a member of the AMH population that lived alongside the last Neanderthals during the transition.
AR-63 would attest to the presence of AMH in this part of Western Europe during the Châtelperronian period, the researchers wrote.
“The creators of the Châtelperronian could then be human groups where Neanderthals and AMH lived side by side.”
If this hypothesis is validated, the team said that “Châtelperronian may be the result of cultural diffusion or acculturation processes with possible population mixing between the two groups.”
This means that Neanderthals learned from modern humans and used tool making to develop their technologies.