In 1958, farmers digging for bat poop in a Chinese cave stumbled on something way stranger—a fossilized skull that would baffle scientists for decades. At first, experts thought it was a Neanderthal, but new micro-CT scans have revealed a twist: it doesn’t fit neatly into Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, or even Homo erectus. Instead, Maba 1 is a mash-up of features—part this, part that, and part “what on Earth is that?” The skull’s brain size is surprisingly modern, but its structure is just too weird to belong to any known species. Some researchers now think it might represent a completely unknown human lineage that lived in Asia 300,000 years ago. Join us as we uncover the mystery of Maba 1 and what it tells us about our strange, twisted evolutionary story. Animation is created by Bright Side. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/
Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightplanet/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en
Stock materials (photos, footages and other): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
00:00This could totally be one of those went-looking-for-copper-found-gold stories,
00:04except in this case, the farmers in China were actually digging for bat droppings.
00:10Yikes! And ended up finding a piece of human skull instead of gold.
00:15Huh? Why would people be looking for dung?
00:19And more importantly, why is that skull so precious, almost like gold?
00:24Let me break it down for you.
00:26First things first, the farmers were just looking for natural fertilizer.
00:32That's why they were rummaging in that cave.
00:34But instead of bat droppings, they hid a piece of a human skull, ancient, heavy, and fossilized.
00:42Scientists named it Maba I and dated it back to 300,000 years ago.
00:48Back then, many different types of ancient humans were roaming the Earth,
00:52so no one could figure out who this skull belonged to.
00:55For decades, experts were guessing.
00:58Could it be Neanderthal or Homo erectus?
01:01Or maybe a totally new species?
01:04The skull was just a fragment, no jaw, no body, making it a real puzzle.
01:10But now, thanks to high-tech micro-CT scans,
01:13researchers have finally looked inside without damaging the fossil.
01:17What they found changes everything.
01:21Rare, tube-like structures in the skull that almost no Neanderthals had.
01:25Could this be evidence of a mysterious, ancient human we never knew existed?
01:30The shape of the inside of the skull looked more like Homo erectus, a much older human species.
01:37But it didn't fully match with this one either.
01:41The skull's size and shape were more like modern humans and Neanderthals.
01:45And it had features that Homo erectus usually didn't have.
01:48For example, a shorter forehead area and a thicker bregma.
01:52That's the spot where two skull bones meet.
01:55Maba-1 also had a strange dent on the forehead, like a bruise frozen in time.
02:02This injury likely happened while the person was alive.
02:06Maybe they fell or had some condition like anemia.
02:09Or even a tumor.
02:11But the person didn't get an infection from it.
02:14So it's possible they healed and lived for a while after whatever happened to them.
02:18So Maba-1 doesn't match any species we know perfectly.
02:22But it has common traits and a very similar story to other mysterious fossils from all over Africa.
02:29For example, back in 1976, one famous paleontologist and her team found another human-like skull in Tanzania.
02:38The skull the scientists found had features that resembled those of Homo sapiens, or modern humans.
02:44Even though it was incredibly old.
02:47Scientists believe it could be one of the earliest examples of our species ever discovered.
02:53A real treasure.
02:55That means this skull might help answer one of the biggest questions in science.
03:00When exactly Homo sapiens first appeared?
03:03The layer of Earth where the skull was found dates back to the late Pleistocene period.
03:08That's way before most textbooks used to say modern humans existed.
03:12Since its discovery, scientists have analyzed the LH1-8 skull in every detail and compared it to other ancient fossils to figure out where it fits on the human family tree.
03:24They found no exact match for it.
03:26But they noticed it was related to other archaic Homo sapiens crania from Africa.
03:32On the other side of the African continent, in the rocky hills of Morocco, miners digging for bearite found bones from some ancient humans and later some stone tools and even animal remains.
03:46At first, researchers thought these bones were from Neanderthals and only about 40,000 years old.
03:52But as they dug deeper, literally, into research, they saw the fossils were actually Homo sapiens and much older, maybe around 160,000 years old.
04:04But something didn't add up as the bones looked more primitive than other known Homo sapiens fossils.
04:10Thanks to new discoveries and better dating methods from the 21st century, scientists figured out that this Moroccan site might be even more important and older than anyone could imagine.
04:22The bones had old and new traits.
04:25The face, jaw, and teeth looked a lot more like modern humans, but the shape of the skull was longer and less rounded, kind of like older human species.
04:34So, this fossil could show what early Homo sapiens' brains looked like before they evolved into the brains we have today.
04:43This group of people could represent the earliest stage of our species.
04:47They were almost like us, just not quite there yet.
04:51Some scientists don't agree and think that these fossils might not be true Homo sapiens, but rather close relatives, probably Homo antisere.
05:00That species could be a shared ancestor of both Neanderthals and humans.
05:06One thing is clear.
05:07Early Homo sapiens didn't just come from one place, but from all over Africa.
05:13And some of them, now it's even trickier to say who exactly created the tools and cultural objects during the Middle Stone Age.
05:20And then, there is another mysterious unidentified find, the skull from Zambia's Broken Hill ore mine.
05:30Miners found it, and some other bones, also by accident.
05:34Scientists nicknamed it Rhodesian Man.
05:37At first, they thought it was like a missing evolutionary link between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.
05:42Now, thanks to new research tools, they found it's almost 299,000 years old, and its owner probably lived alongside the primitive species Homo naledi in southern Africa.
05:56All this fits in well with new research that says some parts of our DNA are way older than expected,
06:03even older than the time when our human ancestors split into different populations.
06:07For a while, some experts thought the best explanation was that early humans in Africa interbred with a mystery species,
06:16like how humans mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Europe and Asia.
06:20But we've never found fossils or DNA from this supposed ghost species.
06:25So, instead of saying that unseen species passed us these ancient genes,
06:30scientists used advanced models to study how human DNA changes over time.
06:35And it's possible that the earliest Homo sapiens populations in Africa weren't one big happy family after all.
06:43Between 1,000,000 and 100,000 years ago, Earth went through intense glacial cycles, freezing periods, followed by warmer ones.
06:51These shifts forced human groups to spread out when land was good, and then pushed them back together when conditions got rough.
06:58Advanced analysis of the genomes of living people from all over the world, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas,
07:06showed that two separate human population groups reunited about 300,000 years ago.
07:13One of them, which had gone through a rough time and nearly vanished at one point,
07:17made up around 80% of the genes in modern humans.
07:21The other group added the remaining 20%.
07:24And that 20% may have made a huge difference, especially in areas like brain function and how our neurons work.
07:33Unlike Neanderthals, whose DNA make up only about 1-4% of the genome of non-Africans today,
07:40this ancient mixing event added 10 times that amount.
07:43And it's in everyone!
07:44Scientists still need to figure out who these mystery ancestors were.
07:50From fossil evidence, it looks like Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis,
07:54who lived in Africa and beyond during that time, might match these ancient populations.
08:00But researchers will need more clues, both genetic and fossilized, to be sure.
08:05Some of them think that the features of one group may come from an even older ancestor species,
08:11like Homo antisaur, whose fossils were found in Spain.
08:16Maybe the answer is hiding in the Khoisan people in southern Africa,
08:20who have more genetic diversity than all other humans combined.
08:24That's because they've had a long and isolated history,
08:27and their ancestors go way back to those ancient branches of early Homo sapiens.
08:32About 15% of their DNA comes from Europeans,
08:36and they also carry East African ancestry from about 2,000 years ago.
08:42Now, scientists think that descendants of both West and East Africans
08:46eventually left Africa and populated the rest of the world.
08:51Looks like these people were the product of multiple branches of Homo sapiens coming back together.
08:56It's clear from this research that we aren't a species with one clean origin.
09:00Perhaps it's time we stop talking about African ancestry as one thing.
09:06Africa is hugely diverse, and so are the roots of humanity.
09:12That's it for today.
09:13So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
09:18Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.
Be the first to comment