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The discovery of Homo luzonensis, a new human species living on the island of Luzon (Philippines), asks a question as interesting as it is difficult to answer: how could it happen?
Fossils found include a foot bone at least 67,000 years old, as well as other bone remains and teeth that are at least 50,000 years old. In a nearby valley, stone tools were found, characteristic of primitive men 700,000 years old. This island has been separated from the mainland by hundreds of miles of deep seabed for at least two and a half million years, an impregnable barrier to any human species, with the exception of Homo sapiens or at least, this has been thought up until now.
Florent Detroit, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and co-discoverer of the new species, does not close the door to those hominids with the courage and curiosity to go to sea. do not think that Homo erectus, probable ancestor of the newly discovered species, "was intelligent enough to cross the sea on purpose, but we have more and more evidence that they settled on several islands in Southeast Asia, so this Is probably not a coincidence, "suggests. "In addition, it is impossible for a population to settle on an island making a single trip, it took several arrivals with several individuals of both bades to prosper the population," says the paleoanthropologist.
The theory is supported by the existence of another member of our kind, the Homo floresiensis, which also arrived by sea at the Indonesian island of Flores and underwent an evolutionary process of dwarfism until it was reduced to one meter in height with a brain of about 400 cm3 (the sapiens we have about 1,300).
Most experts believe that these two species have reached their destination aboard natural rafts. "You have to imagine the mighty rivers that cross the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and that after a storm or tsunami, a mbad of leaves and trunks drags," says Antonio Rosas, paleoanthropologist of the Southeast Asia. CSIC. "The hominids would have gone up and the currents did the rest.These natural rafts are the most plausible explanation of how primates arrived from Africa to South America there are about 23 million of them." They also explain the arrival of some reptiles in the Galapagos Islands and mammals in the island of Madagascar, "he said. It's an enigma to know how long these trips have lasted and how the animals have survived them.
María Martinón, director of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution, provides another argument against the fact that primitive hominids are browsers. "We have no evidence that hominids from Flores and Luzón were curious or what we called Wanderlust [un impulso fuerte por el viaje y la exploración]"He explains." The proof is that there is no evidence of movement between the islands. It is very likely that once on these islands, they were trapped. The sets of tools found are neither specific nor specific. In general, it is admitted that they consumed mainly terrestrial fauna, but that the impossibility of developing sophisticated fishing technologies may be one of the reasons why they were not very mobile or with great dispersal capacity, "he adds.
Most experts believe that these two species have reached their destination aboard natural rafts
This eagerness to discover new territories beyond the ocean would be reserved for sapiensas well as the art of greater complexity, such as that of the Altamira caves in Spain or Chauvet and Lascaux in France, all after the arrival of the sapiens on the continent about 40,000 years ago. These same dates are the first evidence of deep-water navigation in Asia badociated with Homo sapiens catch tuna. Unlike the Homo above, the sapiens they would have been the first to live almost exclusively on the consumption of fish, which led them to control navigation. It was also around this time, about 35,000 years ago, that rock art from the island of Sulawesi, Flores' neighbor, appears. The Flores hobbit was gone 15,000 years ago, when the first sapiens They came to the archipelago.
Even the Neanderthals, the human species that has evolved in Europe and are considered very similar beings, with their own ornaments and their own arts, have been entrusted to navigation, says Jean-Jacques Hublin, expert Institute Max Planck of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany). "Even so, even the Neanderthals who lived in Italy today did not go to Sicily," he says.
There are still many unknowns about the cognitive abilities of the Homo erectus. He had a cranial capacity of about 1 100 cm3 and a complexion very similar to ours, perfect for walking and running. It is the merit of being the human species that has existed for longer, nine times more than the sapiens. Its origin dates back to Africa about two million years ago. From there it came out 1.8 million and in record time it reached Europe and Asia. It is also the first engraving made by a human being: a zigzag line made on a shell of mollusk that had probably served him before the food. This discovery was made on the island of Java where, in this case, he had come in a dirt corridor that then covered the sea. For the moment sapiens we are always the first browsers.
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