Humankind's tangled shrub of ancestry now has a new branch: Researchers in the Philippines announced today that they have discovered a species of ancient human previously unknown to science.

The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones—hosts a patchwork of ancient and more advanced features. The landmark discovery, announced in Nature on Wednesday, makes Luzon the third Southeast Asian island in the last 15 years to bear signs of unexpectedly ancient human activity.

“For a long, long time, the Philippine islands [have] been more or less left [out]," says study coauthor and project leader Armand Mijares, an archaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman and a National Geographic grantee. But H. luzonensis flips the script, and it continues to challenge the outdated idea that the human line neatly progressed from less advanced to more advanced species.

Human Origins 101 The story of human evolution began about seven million years ago, when the lineages that lead to Homo sapiens and chimpanzees separated. Learn about the early human species that belong in our family tree and how the natural selection of certain physical and behavioral traits defined what it means to be human.

“This new discovery made me thrilled,” Yousuke Kaifu, a paleoanthropologist at Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science who was not part of the new study, says via email. “It further highlights remarkable diversity of archaic (primitive) hominins once present in Asia, in a way beyond my expectation.”

Aida Gómez-Robles, a paleoanthropologist at University College London who reviewed the study before publication, is hesitant to unequivocally say the find represents a new species. But she adds that all possibilities to explain the unusual fossils are equally intriguing.

“It’s absolutely one of the most important findings that [will] be out in a number of years,” she says.

Digging deeper into Asia's past

Decades ago, the story of Asia seemed far more straightforward, if incomplete. Paleoanthropologists knew that archaic hominins such as Homo erectus ventured over land bridges into parts of what is now Indonesia nearly a million years ago. But farther east, it was thought that these hominins ran into ocean currents considered impassable without boats.

Luzon seemed especially difficult for ancient hominins to reach, as it had never been connected to the mainland by land bridges, so archaeologists thought that digging into deeper, older layers of soil wouldn't yield much. When Mijares first excavated Callao Cave in 2003, he found 25,000-year-old evidence of human activity—but he didn't dig any deeper than about four feet down.

“Most Southeast Asian archaeologists would only excavate cave sites up to two meters, and they would stop,” Mijares says.

Pull Quote He called me up and said, Hello mate, you've got human remains. And I said, Really? Then we'll go grab a beer! Armand Mijares, University of the Philippines Diliman

That all changed in 2004, when researchers unveiled Homo floresiensis—a diminutive hominin, also known as the “hobbit,” that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores until 50,000 years ago. Inspired, Mijares returned to Callao Cave in 2007 to literally dig deeper.

The team excavated more than five feet of clay below where they had stopped digging in 2003, with no fossils in sight. But then they found a layer of breccia, a type of rock formed from a jumble of other materials. Tantalizingly, this layer contained fragments of bone that had washed into the cave long ago. At first, the bones seemed to include only animals such as deer and pigs. But under closer inspection, one piece stood out: a nearly complete foot bone that looked human. The team sent the fossil to Philip Piper, a coauthor of the new study, who was looking through the animal remains.

“He called me up and said, Hello mate, you've got human remains,” Mijares says. “And I said, Really? Then we'll go grab a beer!”

In 2010, Mijares and his colleagues unveiled the 67,000-year-old fossil, which they tentatively suggested belonged to a small-bodied member of Homo sapiens, making it perhaps the oldest sign of our species anywhere in the Philippines at the time. But Mijares suspected that it might actually belong to a new species, maybe even a Luzon analog to H. floresiensis. The team needed more fossils to be sure.

Human origins Over millions of years, Africa, Asia, and Europe incubated a dazzling array of ancient human relatives. Today only one branch of the family tree remains: us. Homo luzonensis Homo sapiens Today The newest addition A toe bone found in a cave in the Philippines in 2007 appeared to belong to our genus, Homo. Additional specimens, including more toe bones, teeth, finger bones, and a femur shaft, point to a new species. One million years ago (mya) Two mya Homo Three mya Long lower legs were adapted to walking and running; smaller teeth and larger brains in later H. erectus could indicate they hunted and ate more meat. Four mya Australopithecines Early species were adapted to climbing as well as bipedalism; later species had more specialized diets of tough, fibrous food. Jason treat, NGM STAFF SOURCES: LEE BERGER, UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND (WITS); JOHN HAWKS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON; Florent Détroit, Armand Salvador Mijares, And Others, Nature, 2019 Human origins Over millions of years, Africa, Asia, and Europe incubated a dazzling array of ancient human relatives. Today only one branch of the family tree remains: us. Four million years ago (mya) Three mya Two mya One mya Today Homo luzonensis Homo H. floresiensis Long lower legs were adapted to walking and running; smaller teeth and larger brains in later H. erectus could indicate they hunted and ate more meat. Denisovans H. neanderthalensis H. heidelbergensis Homo sapiens H. naledi H. erectus H. rudolfensis H. sp. (species unknown) H. habilis Kenyanthropus platyops Australopithecus anamensis The newest addition A. sediba A toe bone found in a cave in the Philippines in 2007 appeared to belong to our genus, Homo. Additional specimens, including more toe bones, teeth, finger bones, and a femur shaft, point to a new species. A. afarensis A. garhi A. africanus A. boisei A. aethiopicus A. robustus Australopithecines Early species were adapted to climbing as well as bipedalism; later species had more specialized diets of tough, fibrous food. Jason treat, NGM STAFF SOURCES: LEE BERGER, UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND (WITS); JOHN HAWKS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON; Florent Détroit, Armand Salvador Mijares, And Others, Nature, 2019

Something old, something new

As luck would have it, excavations uncovered two more toe bones along with seven teeth, two finger bones, and part of a femur on return trips to Callao Cave in 2011 and 2015. In all, the remains represent at least three individuals.

The small fossils' curves and grooves reveal an unexpected mix of both ancient and more advanced traits. The teeth's small sizes and relatively simple shapes, for instance, point to a more “modern” individual, but one upper premolar has three roots—a trait found in fewer than 3 percent of modern humans. And one foot bone resembles those of the ancient australopithecines, a group that includes the famous human relative Lucy, who trekked across Africa roughly three million years ago.

View Images Five of the seven teeth attributed to Homo luzonensis. The teeth have small sizes and relatively simple shapes, but one premolar has three roots, which is uncommon among modern humans. Photograph Courtesy of © Callao Cave Archaeology Project

View Images This foot bone, attributed to Homo luzonensis, is unusually curved—a trait more commonly seen in more ancient cousins of modern humans, such as Africa's australopithecines. Photograph Courtesy of © Callao Cave Archaeology Project

“I agree with [the] authors that the combination of features is like nothing we have seen before,” says María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution.

New York University anthropologist Shara Bailey, an expert on ancient teeth, notes that South Africa's Homo naledi—discovered by a team including National Geographic grantee Lee Berger—also has features that look both ancient and modern. She takes the two discoveries as a sign that “mosaic” evolution was more common among hominins than once thought.

Martinón-Torres further suggests that the mix of dental features somewhat resembles that seen in 15,000-year-old hominin remains from Dushan in southern China, which she and her colleagues recently described. Along with H. luzonensis, the discoveries join recent finds hinting that by 12,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene epoch drew to a close, hominins in Asia had a startling amount of diversity.

What's in a name?

While many scientists laud the research for its thoroughness, defining a species from just 13 small bones and teeth is tricky. Though the scientists attempted to extract DNA, they were unsuccessful, as is common for samples that have stewed for millennia in the heat and humidity of tropical locales.

The small stature of H. luzonensis could also cause some traits of the bones to appear more primitive than they truly are, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. This muddles comparisons of this species to other known hominins. While there are compelling features, and he thinks the case for a new species is reasonable, his overall take is: “I really wish there were more bones.”

Other researchers are more confident in holding up H. luzonensis as a new species.

“The discovery team has done a very meticulous and commendable job describing these new fossils, and their naming of a new species, in my opinion, is valid,” Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, an expert on H. floresiensis who wasn't involved with the study, says in an email. “This is a truly sensational finding.”

Lead study author Florent Détroit, a lecturer at France's National Museum of Natural History, adds that “species” are human-made categories that aim to clarify evolutionary history, not necessarily hard-and-fast biological realities.

“[If] in the future, colleagues are able to show that we were wrong because the fossils can enter one of the already known hominin species, we will just lump it and forget about it, but in the meantime, I am convinced it is the way we had to do it,” he says via email.

Tools of the trade

However the new hominin is ultimately defined, researchers are excited by hints that our ancient relatives in the Philippines were engaging in some very familiar activities, including signs of tool use.

The 2010 paper that introduced the Callao cave foot bone—which is now considered a part of H. luzonensis—mentions that a deer bone found in the same sediments bears what look like stone-tool cut marks. Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, takes the bone as a sign that H. luzonensis was a proficient toolmaker and hunter.

There's also evidence that H. luzonensis, or another ancient hominin, lived on Luzon even further back in time. In 2018, Mijares and his colleagues announced the discovery of stone tools and a butchered rhinoceros skeleton that are more than 700,000 years old, found not too far from Callao Cave. Because of the time gap between the remains and the tool site, however, it's tough to say whether the stone tool users were predecessors of H. luzonensis or an unrelated hominin.

Raft of possibilities

While evolution sculpted H. luzonensis into a small form similar to that of H. floresiensis, we don't know which island conditions drove the differences between the two species. Also, while a barrage of studies makes clear that interspecies unions happened regularly, we don't know whether H. luzonensis ancestors interacted or bred with other hominin species that lived in Asia at the time, such as the enigmatic Denisovans.

“You could see this as kind of a natural experiment in human evolution,” says Gerrit van den Bergh of the University of Wollongong, an expert on H. floresiensis.

Another major unknown is how the ancestors of H. luzonensis even reached the Philippines. In 2016, researchers unveiled stone tools on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that date to between 118,000 and 194,000 years old—or at least 60,000 years older than the island's oldest known modern humans. Taken alongside the remains from Flores and Luzon, the sites suggest that ancient hominin dispersal throughout the region wasn't necessarily as rare—or as accidental—as researchers once thought.

“If rhinos can swim and get to places, certainly we can think of erectus, floresiensis, and luzonensis not necessarily just swimming but at least rafting, if not boating,” Petraglia says. “It's just pure speculation, but you could posit that and make some convincing arguments.”

One thing remains clear: Southeast Asia probably was home to more hominin species than current fossils let on. For his part, Mijares is continuing to look for other signs of H. luzonensis, including a current search at Luzon's Biak na Bato National Park, done with support from the National Geographic Society. Through it all, Mijares sees the future for H. luzonensis—and for Asian anthropology—as bright.</s>A tiny, long-lost cousin of our own human species has been discovered, scientists announced Wednesday.

Several foot and hand bones, a partial leg bone and teeth of the long-extinct, previously undiscovered creature were found in Callao Cave in the Philippines.

“This is a truly sensational finding,” Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, told Science magazine. The paper “sent shivers down my spine,” he said.

These fossils "provide sufficient evidence of a new species" that lived on the island of Luzon about 50,000 to 67,000 years ago, according to a new study. That's roughly the same time that some of our ancestors began to leave Africa. As a shout-out to where it was discovered, the authors named the new species Homo luzonensis.

The study lead authors were paleoanthropologist Florent Détroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and archaeologist Armand Salvador Mijares of the University of the Philippines.

The creatures may have been only about 3 feet tall, which is roughly the size of the fictional hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien's books.

“We can only speculate but it might be only in the range of a pygmy Homo sapiens,” Mijares told Reuters.

The species is an extinct offshoot of our own species but is not a direct ancestor.

"Most extinct hominin species are not our direct ancestors, but instead are close relatives with evolutionary histories that took a slightly different path from ours," according to the study.

The species lived in eastern Asia around the same time as our species and other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the diminutive “hobbits” of the island of Flores in Indonesia.

The "remarkable discovery ... will no doubt ignite plenty of scientific debate over the coming weeks, months and years," said anthropologist Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Ontario.

Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said the Luzon find “shows we still know very little about human evolution, particularly in Asia.”

The discovery was announced in a paper in this week’s Nature, a peer-reviewed British journal.</s>Fossil bones and teeth found in the Philippines have revealed a long-lost cousin of modern people, which evidently lived around the time our own species was spreading from Africa to occupy the rest of the world.

It’s yet another reminder that, although Homo sapiens is now the only surviving member of our branch of the evolutionary tree, we’ve had company for most of our existence.

And it makes our understanding of human evolution in Asia “messier, more complicated and whole lot more interesting,” says one expert, Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature, scientists describe a cache of seven teeth and six bones from the feet, hands and thigh of at least three individuals. They were recovered from Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines in 2007, 2011 and 2015. Tests on two samples show minimum ages of 50,000 years and 67,000 years.

The main exodus of our own species from Africa that all of today’s non-African people are descended from took place around 60,000 years ago.

Analysis of the bones from Luzon led the study authors to conclude they belonged to a previously unknown member of our “Homo” branch of the family tree. One of the toe bones and the overall pattern of tooth shapes and sizes differ from what’s been seen before in the Homo family, the researchers said.

It apparently used stone tools and its small teeth suggest it might have been rather small-bodied, said one of the study authors, Florent Detroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

H. luzonensis lived in eastern Asia at around the same time as not only our species but other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the diminutive “hobbits” of the island of Flores in Indonesia.

There’s no sign that H. luzonensis encountered any other member of the Homo group, Detroit said in an email. Our species isn’t known to have reached the Philippines until thousands of years after the age of the bones, he said.

But some human relative was on Luzon more than 700,000 years ago, as indicated by the presence of stone tools and a butchered rhino dating to that time, he said. It might have been the newfound species or an ancestor of it, he said in an email.

Detroit said it’s not clear how H. luzonensis is related to other species of Homo. He speculated that it might have descended from an earlier human relative, Homo erectus, that somehow crossed the sea to Luzon.

H. erectus is generally considered the first Homo species to have expanded beyond Africa, and it plays a prominent role in the conventional wisdom about evolution outside that continent. Some scientists have suggested that the hobbits on the Indonesian island are descended from H. erectus.

Tocheri, who did not participate it the new report, agreed that both H. luzonensis and the hobbits may have descended from H. erectus. But he said the Philippines discovery gives new credence to an alternate view: Maybe some unknown creature other than H. erectus also slipped out of Africa and into Europe and Asia, and later gave rise to both island species.

After all, he said in an interview, remains of the hobbits and H. luzonensis show a mix of primitive and more modern traits that differ from what’s seen in H. erectus. They look more like what one what might find in Africa 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago, and which might have been carried out of that continent by the mystery species, he said.

The discovery of a new human relative on Luzon might be “smoke from a much, much bigger fire,” he said.

Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said the Luzon find “shows we still know very little about human evolution, particularly in Asia.”

More such discoveries will probably emerge with further work in the region, which is under-studied, he said in an email.

Want more stories about science?
• Scientists create mice with night vision. Here's what that means for humans.
• Here's how smart toilets of the future could protect your health

SIGN UP FOR THE MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.</s>A tiny, long-lost cousin of our own human species has been discovered, scientists announced Wednesday.

Several foot and hand bones, a partial leg bone, and teeth of the long-extinct creature have been found in a cave in the Philippines.

These fossils "provide sufficient evidence of a new species" that lived on the island of Luzon about 50,000 to 67,000 years ago, according to a new study. That's roughly the same time that some of our ancestors began to leave Africa. The authors named the new species Homo luzonensis.

The creatures may only have been about 3 feet tall.

The species is an extinct offshoot of our own species but is not a direct ancestor. "Most extinct hominin species are not our direct ancestors, but instead are close relatives with evolutionary histories that took a slightly different path from ours," according to the study.

The species lived in eastern Asia at around the same time as not only our species but other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the diminutive “hobbits” of the island of Flores in Indonesia.

The "remarkable discovery . . . will no doubt ignite plenty of scientific debate over the coming weeks, months and years," said anthropologist Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Ontario.

The discovery was announced in a paper in this week’s Nature, a peer-reviewed British journal.</s>Fossil bones and teeth found in the Philippines have revealed a long-lost cousin of modern people, which evidently lived around the time our own species was spreading from Africa to occupy the rest of the world.

Please welcome a possible new member to our band of upright apes: Homo luzonensis, whose teeth and bones were discovered in an island cave. The remains represent a new species, scientists concluded in a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. They named it after Luzon, the island in the Philippines where the remains were found.

Our genus, the Homo in Homo sapiens, contains multitudes, including the thick-browed yet sophisticated Neanderthals and Homo erectus, a nearly 2 million-year-old species that may be our direct ancestor.

Homo luzonensis is the fourth peculiar and extinct human discovered in this century. Homo floresiensis, so small it was nicknamed "the hobbit," was found in Indonesia in 2004. Mysterious Denisovans, identified as a species based on a finger bone in 2010, lived in Siberia. Homo naledi skeletons, with strange mixes of modern and primitive features, were pulled out of an African cave in 2013.

Together, these newfound species show that human evolution was highly versatile, as groups adapted to unfamiliar conditions around the world. Modern humans were not alone - our close kin survived until fairly recently. And some of our co-inhabitants possibly embarked on long sea voyages, suggesting similar levels of intelligence.

"The evolution of our evolutionary group, Homo, is getting weirder and weirder," said paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, who directs the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program and was not involved with this research. Like Homo naledi, these fossils show a jumble of old and new traits, Potts said. Their particular combination suggests these humans were "unknown previously to science."

In 2007, Armand Mijares, an archaeologist at the University of Philippines, asked his colleague Philip Piper to examine animal bones Mijares dug out of Callao Cave in Luzon. The expansive cave yawns open above a river plain. One limestone chamber is so large it houses a Catholic chapel. A deposit of bones in the entrance chamber goes back to the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.

Piper, a zooarchaeologist at Australia National University, set about cataloguing the animal remains. "On the second day I was working through them," he said, "I pulled out a human metatarsal." Piper immediately rang Mijares about the unexpected foot bone, exclaiming, as he recalled, "'Oh my God, we've got human bones in here!'"

Piper, Mijares and their team published a description of the foot bone in 2010. They knew it was the oldest human remain in the Philippines, dated to 67,000 years ago, based on the amount of the radioactive element uranium in the fossil. But the 2010 paper didn't address who walked on that foot. "We didn't know what it was at that time, except that it was human," Piper said.

Mijares returned to Callao Cave and uncovered more remains in 2011 and 2015. All told, the scientists pulled a dozen fossilized parts from the cave - teeth, a thigh bone, finger bones and foot bones, representing three individuals. Attempts to extract DNA from the remains were unsuccessful.

The body parts are diminutive, suggesting Homo luzonensis grew no more than 4 feet tall. Its molars have modern shapes. The way its leg muscle attached to its thigh bone is "distinctively human," Potts said.

The bones in its hands and feet are curved, "spitting images" of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the very ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.

This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). "We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth," said study author Florent Detriot, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

New York University anthropologist Susan Anton, an expert on Homo erectus, was skeptical the remains came from a new species. The study authors "don't have any heads," said Anton, who described herself as "somewhat conservative and somewhat of a lumper." ("Lumpers," unlike "splitters," are more reluctant to categorize fossils or living organisms as different species.) Skulls, rich in anthropological detail, would be more convincing, she said.

Each difference in bone or tooth shape is subtle. "That's one reason to be a little cautious about this," said University of Wisconsin at Madison's John Hawks, who helped lead the expedition to excavate Homo naledi bones and was not involved in this discovery. But those differences, taken in aggregate, make a "reasonable" case for a new species, he said.

The study authors do not know how Homo luzonensis reached the island, which at 42,000 square miles is the 15th largest island in the world.

Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.

A few "mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland," Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.

Random weather events, like tsunamis, may have swept people across a prehistoric sea as they clung to detritus, Anton suggested. "After climatic events or accidents, you can get particularly clever organisms surviving in places that they maybe shouldn't be," she said.

Hawks wondered if these humans deliberately crossed the ocean. "I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out," he said. "That's not a Homo sapiens trait. It's something our ancestors and extinct relatives had."

It is also possible Luzon's first inhabitants meandered there from the Indonesian archipelago, hopping across island chains.

The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier, particularly when species adapt to islands.

An island's confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches' beaks. Small animals enlarge, large animals shrink, slight contrasts grow pronounced. "Think about the Galapagos islands: Each of the islands has got its own species of tortoise," Piper said.

"Isolation plays games," Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an "odd little laboratory of human evolution," he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.

"It's beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid," Potts said. "And it's surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record." The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.

Is it possible other human species evolved on these island laboratories and that their fossils are waiting to be found? "I wouldn't be surprised," Piper said.

Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.

"The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined," Hawks said. "This isn't 'Flowers for Algernon,' where, suddenly, we're super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us." Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens' survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease. "I'd say the doors have opened, and we haven't figured out where they lead."</s>Scientists have identified a new human ancestor species previously unknown to science: Meet Homo luzonensis.

Standing an estimated three to four feet tall, Homo luzonensis—classified as a separate species on the basis of 13 bones and teeth from two adults and one child found in a cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines—adds another twist to the increasingly complex timeline of human evolution. Some 50,000 to 67,000 years ago, the diminutive hominin roamed Earth alongside a host of other early humans, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, similarly petite Homo floresiensis, and our own species, Homo sapiens.

As paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, tells the Washington Post’s Ben Guarino, “The evolution of our evolutionary group, Homo, is getting weirder and weirder.”

Homo luzonensis, described this week in the journal Nature, boasted an eclectic mix of features comparable to different species of hominins. Unlike Homo sapiens, whose premolar teeth generally have a single root, Homo luzonensis' premolars had two or three roots, similar to more primitive species such as Homo erectus, which lived in Africa and Asia between about 1.89 million and 143,000 years ago. The species' molars were “incredibly small” with single roots, Lizzie Wade reports for Science magazine—even smaller than those of Homo floresiensis, a hominin species discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 and given the nickname "Hobbit" for its tiny size.

Given that tooth size is generally indicative of body size, it’s likely Homo luzonensis was smaller than Homo sapiens, and perhaps even smaller than Homo floresiensis, as the study's lead author Florent Détroit, a paleoanthropologist at Paris’ Museum of Man, explains to Wade.

Still, Détroit tells Reuters’ Will Dunham, “We have to stay cautious about it, especially because people will immediately have Homo floresiensis in mind as a ‘model’ for the physical appearance of Homo luzonensis, which was certainly not the case.”

A clear difference between the newly discovered species and most members of the Homo genus is Homo luzonensis’ curved finger and toe bones, reports NPR's Christopher Joyce. The digits closely resemble those of Australopithecus, a group of “tree-climbing, ape-like creature[s]” that populated the planet as early as several million years before the advent of Homo erectus, Earth’s first known hominin to migrate out of Africa.

As Michael Greshko and Maya Wei-Haas write for National Geographic, Homo erectus likely used land bridges to reach what is now Indonesia around a million years ago. Previously, most researchers believed it would have been impossible for early hominins to venture farther east without boats, but the discovery of Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis suggests our ancient relatives were better-traveled than once thought.

Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist who was not involved in the new research, tells the Post’s Guarino that early hominins may have arrived on distant islands, including Luzon, during tsunamis and major weather events. Anton explains that waves could have swept these individuals, clinging onto debris in an instinctual attempt to survive, to “places that they maybe shouldn’t be.”

Members of Homo floresiensis are thought to have evolved from an early hominin, perhaps Homo erectus, developing their small stature only after landing on isolated islands—and the same could be true for Homo luzonensis, Kiona N. Smith reports for Ars Technica.

It’s also possible that Homo luzonensis descended from a Homo lineage other than Homo erectus. Matthew Tocheri, an anthropologist at Lakehead University who wrote a Nature News and Views piece accompanying the study, tells Smith that Homo luzonensis and Homo floresiensis could just as easily be descendants of another Homo species that left Africa around the same time as Homo erectus.

The two toe bones, two finger bones, seven teeth, femur shaft and foot bone unearthed in Luzon offer only scant evidence of the two adults and one child whose remains they represent. Although the authors of the Nature study found that the fragments are distinct enough to warrant their classification as an entirely new species, others remain unconvinced—particularly because the team was unable to extract DNA from the bones and teeth, which have spent millennia in the humid confines of Luzon Island’s Callao Cave. One alternative explanation for the unusual bones, according to Science’s Wade, is that the remains belong to a “locally adapted population” of Homo erectus or a similar early hominin.

“I see what they’re saying, but at the same time, I want more,” Anton explains to Science's Wade, adding that the discovery of a skull bone or intact DNA could further solidify the scientists’ conclusions.

Aida Gómez-Robles, a paleoanthropologist at University College London who reviewed the study prior to publication, tells National Geographic’s Greshko and Wei-Haas the research is “absolutely one of the most important findings that [will] be out in a number of years.” Regardless of whether Homo luzonensis is widely accepted as a wholly separate lineage, the results testify to the diversity of early hominin species.

As Tocheri concludes to The New York Times’ Carl Zimmer, “The more fossils that people pull out of the ground, the more we realize that the variation that was present in the past far exceeds what we see in us today.”</s>Scientists are reporting the discovery of a previously unknown species of ancient human that lived in the Philippines over 50,000 years ago. Evidence suggests the new species, named Homo luzonensis, was exceptionally tiny—and possibly even smaller than the famous Hobbit species uncovered on the island of Flores in 2004.



The story of human evolution just got a hell of a lot messier—and considerably more fascinating—owing to the discovery of a previously unknown human species. Bits of teeth and bone pulled from Callao Cave on the Philippine island of Luzon point to the existence of a distinctly human species, one deserving of the Homo designation in terms of its genus. At the same time, however, the fossils found in Callao Cave exhibit features unlike anything ever seen before, thus warranting the declaration of a completely new human species, Homo luzonensis. The details of this astonishing discovery were published today in Nature.

Needless to say, this is a huge deal. New human species tend to not be discovered on a regular basis. The discovery of Homo luzonensis, with its curious set of physical characteristics, is telling us some surprising new things about human evolution and what happened to the pioneering hominins who left Africa so long ago.

This story begins in 2010 with the important discovery of a single human foot bone, dated at 67,000 years old, in Callao Cave. The exact species could not be determined, but it was the first direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines. As an important aside, we’ve since learned that hominins—the sub-group of primates that are more closely related to us than to chimpanzees and bonobos—were living in the Philippines as long as 709,000 years ago.

Indeed, the story of human evolution is getting increasingly complicated. Hominins first appeared in Africa some 6 to 7 million years ago, with the first evidence of a hominid presence in Eurasia dating back about 1.8 million years ago, likely the archaic human known as Homo erectus. Incredibly, this dispersal happened long before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged; we finally entered onto the scene 300,000 years ago, spilling into Eurasia about 100,000 years later. There, we joined two other human species, the Neanderthals and Denisovans.



Most extinct hominins are not our direct ancestors, but they’re our very close relatives. Each species went on its own evolutionary journey, adapting to their new circumstances and environments in different ways. By around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, there were multiple human species living at the same time, doing their own thing at various locations in both Africa and Eurasia.

The scientists who found the human foot bone in the Philippines, a team led by Florent Détroit from the National Museum of Natural History in France and Armand Mijares from the University of the Philippines, kept working at Callao Cave in an effort to find more clues. These ongoing excavations resulted in the discovery of 12 new hominin elements, including teeth, a partial thigh bone, and several hand and foot bones. These fossils belonged to three different individuals, two adults and one child. No genetic evidence could be extracted from the specimens, and sadly, no skulls were found. These remains were pulled from the same stratigraphic layer as the foot bone found in 2010, dating these individuals to the same time period.

Analysis of the bones and teeth suggested a previously unknown species of human. Also, these hominins appear to have been exceptionally small. The authors of the new study suspect H. luzonensis was subject to an evolutionary process known as insular dwarfism, in which a species’ body size becomes significantly reduced over time on account of limited access to resources. A similar thing likely happened to Homo floresiensis, an extinct human species popularly known as the Hobbit. The remains of these diminutive humans, who stood no taller than around 3 feet and 7 inches (109 centimeters), were discovered on the island of Flores in Southeast Asia back in 2004. The discovery of Homo luzonensis—who may have been shorter than the Hobbits—may signify the presence of yet another human species moulded by insular dwarfism—a rather astounding discovery, to say the least. It’s important to point out, however, that insular dwarfism in H. luzonensis remains a distinct, yet unproven, possibility. As the authors noted in the study, “further discoveries and more definitive evidence are needed.”

The Hobbits and H. luzonensis bear striking similarities, and they were around at roughly the same time, but their evolutionary relationship is not known. It’s conceivable that both human species are descendents of H. erectus, and that both ended up isolated on their respective islands.

In terms of the distinct physical differences observed in H. luzonensis, the most notable were seen in their teeth and foot bones. Their molars, in particular, were unlike anything ever seen before in a human species. Writing in an accompanying News & Views article, anthropologist Matthew Tocheri from Lakehead University in Thunderbay, Ontario, described how their teeth exhibited both ancient and modern features.



This is unbelievably fascinating, but the story gets even more intriguing—and potentially even more confusing.

The third metatarsal—the long bone in the middle toe—in H. luzonensis is exceptionally strange, bearing an uncanny resemblance to those seen in Australopithecus—an ancient human ancestor that lived in Africa some 3 million years ago and never left Africa. Well, at least to the best of our knowledge. H. luzonensis also featured hand bones similar to those of Australopithecus.

There are at least two possible explanations for this odd toe bone, neither of which seem wholly plausible.



Crazy theory number one: Conventional thinking has it that Homo erectus was the only hominin species to have left Africa during the Early Pleistocene, the period between 2.58 to 0.78 million years ago. The evidence found in Callao Cave would seem to suggest that we’ve got it all wrong, and that other hominins, including groups more closely related to Australopithecus (or even Australopithecus itself!), made their way into Eurasia during this period. More evidence is needed to back this extraordinary possibility.

Crazy theory number two: An intriguing aspect about the H. Luzonensis third metatarsal is that it allows for more curved toes. This is significant because curved toes are great for tree climbing and hanging from branches. Australopithecus, a suspected tree climber, was equipped with this particular physical feature, and it would seem to suggest the same for H. luzonensis. But if H. Luzonensis is not closely related to Australopithecus, then why the curved toes and hands? It’s possible that some hominins retained their tree-climbing abilities for much longer than is conventionally appreciated. Another possibility is convergent evolution, in which similar physical characteristics appear in unrelated species. Should this be the case, if would mean that, after thousands of years of upright, bipedal locomotion, H. Luzonensis was returning to an arboreal existence, and evolving the requisite physical characteristics. It’s a mind-blowing theory, no doubt, but again, one in desperate need of further evidence.

“The discovery of H. luzonensis underscores the complexity of the evolution, dispersal and diversity of the genus Homo outside of Africa, and particularly in the islands of Southeast Asia, during the Pleistocene,” the authors appropriately conclude in the new study.

Paleontologist Adam Brunn, a researcher at Griffith University and an expert in the hominin colonization of southeast Asia, had been hearing rumours about the Luzon fossils for years, saying it’s “brilliant” to finally seeing the new findings published.

“It’s not everyday a new human species is discovered. To describe one, to add a new relative to our family tree, is an enormous privilege—and a huge responsibility,” explained Brunn in an email to Gizmodo. “The discovery team has done a very meticulous and commendable job describing these new fossils, and their naming of a new species, in my opinion, is valid. This is a truly sensational finding.”

Gerrit van den Bergh, a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Archaeological Science, said the researchers were “justified” in their decision to name the new species. He said it’s fascinating that Luzon is now the second known island, after Flores, in which a distinct human species existed before the arrival of H. sapiens.

“These insular species may have evolved on each island in perfect isolation, and you could say that their evolutionary pathway has gone in a completely different direction as those of their counterparts on mainland Asia, for example Homo erectus or the Neanderthals,” wrote van den Bergh, who wasn’t involved with the new study, in an email to Gizmodo. “Most notably they became very small bodied, which is what also happened to other large mammals that became stranded on islands, such as various fossil pygmy elephants that we know once inhabited many islands in the Mediterranean and Island Southeast Asia.”

Anthropologist Dean Falk from Florida State University had few quibbles with the new paper, but the one issue she did raise was beyond the control of the researchers: their inability to find a skull. Despite this major limitation, she “became convinced that the authors have identified hominins with unique dental features combined with at least some features of hands and feet that resemble Australopithecus,” adding that these “specimens may, indeed, represent a previously unidentified species,” wrote Falk in an email to Gizmodo.

The small teeth of H. luzonensis, she added, suggests they had small bodies, but we can’t know for sure. That said, “insular dwarfism would not be at all surprising on the island.”

“You gotta love the curved hand and feet bones, and I don’t have a problem with speculating that their owners might have spent a good deal of time in trees,” Falk told Gizmodo. “Could it be that—at least some—hominins continued to sleep in tree nests until very recently, at least geologically speaking?”

Ultimately, however, the story of human evolution just got a lot more “bushier,” she said.

No kidding. And a lot more interesting, if that’s even possible. As this new paper beautifully illustrates, the unfolding human origin story is turning out to be absolutely incredible.</s>Filipinos plan more diggings where new human species found

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Archaeologists who discovered fossil bones and teeth of a previously unknown human species that thrived more than 50,000 years ago in the northern Philippines say they plan more diggings and better protection of the popular limestone cave complex where the remains were unearthed.

Filipino archaeologist Armand Salvador Mijares said Thursday the discovery of the remains, which belonged to three individuals, in Callao Cave in Cagayan province made the Philippines an important research ground on human evolution. The new specie is called Homo luzonensis after the main northern island of Luzon, where the remains were dug up starting in 2007.

Another archaeologist, Eusebio Dizon, says the remains are the oldest to be found in the Philippines, predating those discovered in Tabon Cave by thousands of years.</s>A discovery of ancient fossils suggests that humans may have hobbit-sized ancestors.

Archeologists made the discovery in Callao cave on Luzon island in the northern Philippines, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The new species, named Homo luzonensis, stood no taller than four feet and was adept at climbing trees. The fossils date back 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.

Archeologists uncovered seven teeth, two hand bones, three foot bones, and one thigh bone, which they thought belonged to two adults and one child, The Guardian reported. The size of the teeth, which are small, is what led experts to think members of the species were short in stature. The presence of a curved toe indicates that they climbed trees while also being able to walk on two feet — a trait that dates back only to one other ancient species from 2 to 3 million years ago.

Florent Détroit, co-author of the report, said the discovery challenged the commonly accepted narrative of human evolution that suggests the Homo erectus species did not leave Africa until about 1.5 million years ago. In addition, it has been generally accepted that our human ancestors began moving away from Africa about 50,000 years ago. Détroit said the discovery indicated that the evolution of human history was much more intricate than what we have believed.

“We now know that it was a much more complex evolutionary history, with several distinct species contemporaneous with Homo sapiens, interbreeding events, extinctions,” Détroit said, adding that the new species will eventually prove that Homo sapiens were “definitely not alone on Earth.”

How the species arrived on an island in the Philippines is a mystery. The island is not connected to the mainland, which causes many experts to think they arrived by accident through a natural event, such as a tsunami.

Détroit, of the Natural History Museum in Paris, challenged that notion, pointing out that other evidence suggests that the new species had settled on other nearby islands.

Archaeologist Katerina Douka of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany said she did not want to jump the gun about the new species, Science News reported. Until DNA can be extracted from the fossils, there is a chance that they may be a product of interbreeding between earlier Homo species, which would create a hybrid, not a new species.

Another theory is that the Homo erectus species lived on the islands and simply adapted to its surroundings over thousands of years, suggested paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres.

However, the combination of “climbing-ready hand and foot bones” are “unique and unknown so far,” Torres said, which could support the notion that the species is new.</s>Filipino archeologist Armand Salvador Mijares shows a femur bone, one of those they recovered from Callao Cave belonging to a new specie they called Homo luzonensis, during a press conference in metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Thursday, April 11, 2019. Fossil bones and teeth found in Cagayan province, northern Philippines, have revealed a long-lost cousin of modern people, which evidently lived around the time our own species was spreading to Africa to occupy the rest of the world. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Archaeologists who discovered fossil bones and teeth of a previously unknown human species that thrived more than 50,000 years ago in the northern Philippines say they plan more diggings and better protection of the popular limestone cave complex where the remains were unearthed.

Filipino archaeologist Armand Salvador Mijares said Thursday the discovery of the remains, which belonged to three individuals, in Callao Cave in Cagayan province made the Philippines an important research ground on human evolution. The new specie is called Homo luzonensis after the main northern island of Luzon, where the remains were dug up starting in 2007.

Another archaeologist, Eusebio Dizon, says the remains are the oldest to be found in the Philippines, predating those discovered in Tabon Cave by thousands of years.
Homo luzonensis is identified as a new species of human beings discovered in the Callao Cave, Northern Philippines.