IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Fossils of new human species discovered in Philippines cave

Fossilized bones and teeth suggest a long-lost cousin that scientists dubbed Homo luzonensis.
Image: The excavation crew at the Callao Cave in the north of Luzon Island, in the Philippines, where an international multidisciplinary team discovered a new hominin species, Homo Luzonensis, on Aug. 9, 2011.
The excavation crew at the Callao Cave in the north of Luzon Island, in the Philippines, where an international multidisciplinary team discovered a new hominin species, Homo Luzonensis, on Aug. 9, 2011.Armand Salvadore Nujares / AFP - Getty Images file

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 are now the only surviving members 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 the cache of seven teeth and six bones from the feet, hands and thigh of at least three members of the species. 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.

Image: Right upper teeth of an individual of the newly identified species Homo luzonensis, found in Callao Cave on Luzon Island, The Philippines, are seen in this handout photo
Right upper teeth of an individual of the newly identified species Homo luzonensis, found in Callao Cave in the Philippines.Callao Cave Archaeology Project / Reuters

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.

An 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.

They dubbed the creature Homo luzonensis.

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 also 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 rhinoceros 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 Homo species. 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 descended from H. erectus.

Image: Callao Cave on Luzon Island, in the Philippine, where the fossils of newly identified hominin species Homo luzonensis were discovered
The first chamber of Callao Cave where fossils of newly identified hominin species Homo luzonensis were discovered on Luzon Island, in the Philippines, on April 10, 2019.Callao Cave Archaeology Project / Reuters

Tocheri, who did not participate in 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 million 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 the 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 understudied, he said in an email.

Want more stories about science?

SIGN UP FOR THE MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.