Scientists have discovered a new population of prehistoric humans in southwest China, leading evolutionary experts to question if the discovery represents a new form of human species or previously unknown ancestors of modern-day humans.

The Red Deer Cave people — named after one of the two caves they were found in — are “anatomically unique among all members of the human evolutionary tree” with their skulls featuring a mixture of primitive, contemporary and unusual features, says Darren Curnoe, a human evolution specialist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and one of the scientists who led the discovery.

Curnoe and his Chinese counterpart, Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology, studied partial remains found in two caves: One near Longlin village in Guangxi and another near Mengzi in Yunnan. Remains from both caves matched each other, linking the two sites.

The Longlin fossils, including a lower jaw and a skull encased in rock, had been found by a geologist in 1979 but sat in the basement of the Yunnan Institute for 30 years until Ji rediscovered them in 2009.

“After picking up my own jaw off the floor, we both realized we had potentially something quite important here,” Curnoe told the Toronto Star.

They eventually dated the remains to 11,500 years ago after removing the bones from the rock and reassembling the partial skeleton.

The fossils from the second cave — Maludong or Red Deer Cave in Yunnan — were discovered by workers mining a limestone quarry in 1989. They were excavated by local archeologists at the time but, like their Longlin counterparts, they sat barely studied in a science institute in Mengzi. Curnoe and Ji began studying them in 2008.

Curnoe and his team found more remains after re-excavating Maludong and sorting through bags of unsorted fossils from the 1989 excavation. They dated the remains to be about 14,500 years old.

In all, Curnoe and Ji have discovered the partial remains of five Red Deer Cave dwellers in the two caves.

Their findings are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal PLoS One.

Curnoe says further research, including the extraction of DNA from the fossils, needs to happen before scientists can accurately classify the remains. Until then, there’s speculation swirling in the science community about who the Red Deer Cave people were.

“They could be an early modern human population that migrated early into the area (from Africa) and perhaps didn’t contribute genetically to East Asians,” Curnoe says. “Or they could be a new evolutionary line, perhaps even a new species.”

What Curnoe and his team do know is that the Red Deer Cave people lived 14,500 to 11,500 years ago at the end of the Ice Age during a period of ecological and climate change known for causing the extinction of several animal species, including giant deer.

The Red Deer Cave people survived on a diet of cooked deer meat, which became extinct during that time due to ecological and climate changes, and lived near communities of modern-day humans, who at the time were incorporating new forms of farming into their daily life.

The scientists haven’t been able to find any evidence of farming from the Red Deer Cave people but do believe they interacted with the modern-day humans who lived nearby.

Over the next year, scientists will attempt to extract DNA samples from remains in both caves, Curnoe says.

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“One of the difficulties is that, particularly in warm areas, the DNA breaks down or degrades very quickly,” he says, adding that the process of fossilization — where biological tissue gets replaced by chemicals within the soil — further destroys biological matter.

“(The DNA) will give us a really accurate handle on where precisely the Red Deer Cave people fit within the human evolutionary tree and would allow us to classify them accurately to know whether or not they are Homo sapiens or they might represent a new evolutionary line,” Curnoe says.

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