Mystery around the discovery of a new human species: Homo Luzonensis

The discovery occurred is a huge cavity with seven cameras. It is about 13 bones and teeth from a specimen that lived at least 67 thousand years ago on the island of Luzon.

Luzonensis is added to the list of Homo members known at the same time: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flower Hobbits, Erectus and Sapiens.

It is a diverse family of primates linked by more recent kinship ties than with other living hominids, such as chimpanzees or bonobos. Everyone was an experience but only Homo sapiens survived.

At the moment, you can not know how is the Luzon Human no fragment of his skull was found, nor what was his stature because the only available bone that could carve it, the femur of the thigh, is broken.

The first bone found was a phalanx appeared in 2007 and is 67,000 years old. The others were found between 2011 and 2015, they are at least 50 thousand years old and correspond to two adults and one child. There was also two premolars and three molars that are very small, similar to those of a current human or those of Homo floresiensis.

Meanwhile, the bones of the hands and feet were much more primitive, comparable to those of the Australopithecus who lived in Africa two million years ago and whose members were adapted to live suspended trees.

"If you examine each of these traits separately, you will find them in one or the other species of Homo, but if you take the complete package, there is nothing like it. it is therefore a new species "explained the paleoanthropologist of the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, Florent Detroit, co-author of the study that describes new species published Wednesday by the scientific journal Nature.

However it was impossible to extract DNA from the remainswhich increases the mystery of its origin.

For its part, Luzon is surrounded by sea for two and a half million years, so that the human found in the cave of Callao He had to cross it, but you do not know how he did it.

A similar case occurred with the man from Flores to reach his own island, where he made stone tools as sophisticated as those of the sapiens. In Cagayan, a valley near the Philippine Cave, stone utensils appeared that betrayed the presence of hominins at least 700,000 years ago. It is therefore possible that they are dealing with luzonensis.