Anthropology
Ancient human fossil found in Taiwan *IMAGES*
Embargoed until:
27-Jan-2015 11:00 US Eastern time | 16:00 London time
28-Jan-2015 01:00 Japanese time | 03:00 Australian Eastern time
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7037
The first ancient human fossil to be found in Taiwan is reported in Nature
Communications this week. The fossil helps fill a geographical gap in the Asian
fossil record and highlights the diversity of ancient humans living in this region
during the Pleistocene era.
Eastern Asia was home to a diverse range of ancient hominins during the
Pleistocene, including the successful, long-lived Homo erectus found in Java and
China, the diminutive Indonesian island dweller Homo floresiensis, and the
Neanderthals and Denisovans of the Russian Altai mountains.
Chun-Hsiang Chang, Yousuke Kaifu and colleagues report that the fossil, dredged
from the Penghu submarine channel off the western shore of Taiwan, is a robust
mandible with primitive-looking teeth. It is similar in structure to that of another
Middle Pleistocene Homo found in Hexian, Eastern China. The authors have
dubbed the newly discovered Taiwanese hominin, Penghu 1. They believe that
Penghu 1 lived unexpectedly recently, between 190,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Together, the finds suggest that multiple evolutionary lineages of archaic hominins
existed in eastern Asia during the Pleistocene, before the arrival of modern humans
in the region around 40,000 years ago.
CONTACT
Chun-Hsiang Chang (National Museum of Natural Science, Taichung, Taiwan)
E-mail: cch@mail.nmns.edu.tw
Yousuke Kaifu (National Museum of Nature and Science, Ibaraki, Japan)
Tel: +81 29 853 8998; E-mail: kaifu@kahaku.go.jp
Please link to the scientific paper in online versions of your report (the URL will
go live after the embargo ends):
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ncomms7037