A group of fishermen has discovered in Taiwan the jaw of a prehistoric man who lived in this area of the planet about 200,000 years ago, according to analyzes by anthropologists from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Taiwan (China) and the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo (Japan). The newly discovered fossil remains do not resemble any of the known ancient humans . The work has been published in the journal Nature Communications .
The jaw in question was located in the Penghu Canal, about 25 kilometers off the coast of Taiwan. Among its peculiar characteristics is that it is a short jaw (from the lower part that is almost complete) and has unusually large teeth compared to other fossils in this area.
Experts explain that this jaw could have belonged to a hitherto unknown species of hominids, so it is likely that several extinct lineages of humans could have coexisted before the arrival of modern man approximately 40,000 years ago. The study of this fossil, called Penghu1, has revealed that this hominin lived between 10,000 and 190,000 years ago and with a much more robust and larger body structure than the oldest known remains of Homo erectus, for example.
Whether it is a new species of hominid or a subgroup of Homo erectus has yet to be confirmed, but it is certainly a surprising discovery : “What we can say is that it is clearly different from the known northern Homo erectus populations. from China and Japan, and is likely to represent a hitherto unknown group. The uncovered jaw is markedly different from us in its robustness; the width of the bone in the lateral part of the mandible is 20.7 mm and the average for modern human fossils is 14 mm ” , explains Yousuke Kaifu, leader of the study.
