“They go back to the dawn of humanity, to the first fully modern people,” claims rock art expert Paul Taçon of the Australian Museum in Sydney.

He has found that in Australia and South Africa there are dozens of animal-headed people in rock paintings and carvings more than 10,000 years old. Some may be far older. The oldest was an androgynous feline-headed statuette from Germany, thought to be around 32,000 years old.

Together with Christopher Chippindale at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Taçon conducted the first rigorous worldwide survey of prehistoric therianthrope images. They surveyed nearly 5000 examples of rock art, most from northern Australia, Europe and South Africa.

Composite beings

They recorded the frequency and types of therianthropes portrayed, and reviewed their age. Because many images have not been radiocarbon dated, the team also assessed artistic style and content – say, portrayals of extinct animals – and looked at whether motifs were superimposed on top of each other.

Taçon and Chippindale say that belief in therianthropes was common in the distant past. Although they comprised only about one per cent of the works studied, the researchers found examples worldwide, indicating that today’s fascination with hybrids such as werewolves is nothing new. Early humans were just as fascinated by supernatural “composite” beings who exist between the everyday and spirit worlds.

Sven Ouzman of the National Museum of South Africa in Bloemfontein says it is notoriously difficult to date rock art, so he is sceptical of the claim that therianthropes were the first beings ever portrayed. “[But] what Paul and Chris’s paper does do is set up a testable hypothesis,” he says.

Researchers in Australia have accomplished the extremely difficult feat of extracting DNA from his skeleton and were astonished to find the sequence is unique, matching nothing seen before.

The DNA is the oldest ever recovered from human remains. It shows that while the man is completely anatomically modern, he came from a genetic lineage that is now extinct. This finding challenges the prevailing theory that all modern humans are descended from a group of people who migrated from Africa around 100,000 years ago.

“It’s remarkable – totally unpredicted,” says anthropologist Alan Mann of the University of Pennsylvania.

Alan Thorne of the Australian National University in Canberra, who led the new research, says: “A simplistic ‘Out Of Africa’ model is no longer tenable.”

But not all experts agree. “The genetic evidence is equivocal,” says Colin Groves, of the ANU. “The African origin model stands or falls by the fossil evidence. In my opinion, it stands.”

The new research contradicts a recent study of mitochondrial DNA, which supported the Out of Africa theory (��è����Ƶ online, 6 December 2000).

Family trees

The remains of Mungo Man were found on the shores of Lake Mungo in south-eastern Australia in 1974.

In 1995, a team led by Thorne began an attempt to extract genetic material from the remains. Gregory Adcock and his colleagues at CSIRO Plant Industry managed to replicate and sequence a single gene from Mungo Man’s mitochondria. The small genome of these cell powerhouses is passed down the female line.

Simon Easteal, an evolutionary geneticist at ANU, then set about analysing the sequence and comparing it with sequences of the same gene from nine other early Australians – ranging in age from 8,000 to 15,000 years – as well as 3,453 contemporary people from around the world, chimpanzees, bonobos and two European Neanderthals.

According to Easteal’s evolutionary tree, the line that led to the most recent common ancestor of contemporary people, includes the ancient Australians but excludes Mungo Man.

“We can say with a high degree of confidence that modern people arrived in Australia before the new lineage [of the most recent common ancestor] arrived,” Easteal says.

The findings are due to be published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For more on the DNA study of Mungo Man, see the 13 January issue of ��è����Ƶ magazine.