LAST week saw the announcement of not one but two groups of ancient humans, both new to science, and there is no reason to think the discoveries will stop any time soon.
In Israel, a team of researchers discovered bones from a member of a population that apparently lived in the area between 420,000 and 120,000 years ago. These hominins, which the team calls Nesher Ramla Homo, looked a bit like the Neanderthals, and the team claims that members of the new-found group were the Neanderthals’ ancestors. Not everyone agrees, however, and other interpretations have already been put forward.
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Meanwhile, in China, a huge skull from an individual being labelled the Dragon Man has been analysed. The hominin may belong to the mysterious group known as the Denisovans, or, as some of its discoverers claim, it might be a new species called Homo longi.
It is all thoroughly complex, rather uncertain and a little confusing. The past few years have seen many developments that have complicated the story of human evolution, and the latest discoveries only add to the intricacy of our story. For millions of years, it seems the world was populated by a great diversity of human and human-like groups. These groups sometimes interbred, blurring our ideas about what constitutes a species.
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It is to the credit of the Israeli team that it has refrained from giving the Nesher Ramla Homo a species name. With only a handful of bones to go on, not enough even to determine the individual’s sex, giving it such a title would surely be premature. The population it came from appears to be a distinct group, but for now that is all we can say. If we are being consistent, the same is true for the Dragon Man.
Furthermore, we should be wary of any attempt to impose a simple narrative onto human evolution. Our data set is plainly still incomplete and can be reasonably interpreted in many ways. The worst thing we can do is to become wedded to our ideas about how to make sense of it, because they may well be blown out of the water by the next big find.
