Wushan Man (, literally "Shaman Mountain Man") is a set of fossilised remains of an extinct, undetermined non-

hominin The Hominini form a taxonomic tribe of the subfamily Homininae ("hominines"). Hominini includes the extant genera ''Homo'' (humans) and '' Pan'' (chimpanzees and bonobos) and in standard usage excludes the genus ''Gorilla'' (gorillas). The t ...

ape found in central China in 1985. The remains are dated to around 2 million years ago and were originally considered to represent a subspecies of ''

Homo erectus ''Homo erectus'' (; meaning "upright man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago. Several human species, such as '' H. heidelbergensis'' and '' H. antecessor' ...

'' (''H. e. wushanensis'').Ciochon RL. (2009). "The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia. ''Nature''. 459: 910-911. . This piece in Nature is based on a contribution to the forthcoming book" ''Out of Africa I: Who, When and Where?'' (eds, Fleagle, J. G. et al. Springer, 2009) Wushanren_-_IMG_1259

The fossils were found in 1985 in Longgupo ( or "Dragon Bone Slope"), Zhenlongping Village, Miaoyu Town of

Wushan County, Chongqing Wushan County () is a county located in Chongqing municipality. It occupies roughly and has a population of about 600,000. The county seat is located at the western entrance to the Wu Gorge in the Three Gorges region. Wushan is famous for its ...

in the

Three Gorges The Three Gorges () are three adjacent gorges along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, in the hinterland of the People's Republic of China. With a subtropical monsoon climate, they are known for their scenery. The "Three Gorges Scenic A ...

Background

1984 - 1988: Discovery

The "Dragon Bone Slope" at Longgupo was discovered as a site containing fossils in 1984. From 1985 to 1988, it was excavated by a team of Chinese scientists, led by Huang Wanpo from the

Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP; ) of China is a research institution and collections repository for fossils, including many dinosaur and pterosaur specimens (many from the Yixian Formation). As its name suggest ...

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

and the Chongqing National Museum (

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

Province). In 1986, three fore-teeth and a left

mandible In anatomy, the mandible, lower jaw or jawbone is the largest, strongest and lowest bone in the human facial skeleton. It forms the lower jaw and holds the lower tooth, teeth in place. The mandible sits beneath the maxilla. It is the only movabl ...

with two

molars The molars or molar teeth are large, flat teeth at the back of the mouth. They are more developed in mammals. They are used primarily to grind food during chewing. The name ''molar'' derives from Latin, ''molaris dens'', meaning "millstone to ...

were unearthed along with the animal fossils including teeth from the extinct large ape ''

Gigantopithecus ''Gigantopithecus'' ( ; ) is an extinct genus of ape from roughly 2 million to 350,000 years ago during the Early Pleistocene, Early to Middle Pleistocene of southern China, represented by one species, ''Gigantopithecus blacki''. Potential identi ...

'' and pygmy giant panda ''

Ailuropoda microta ''Ailuropoda microta'' is the earliest known ancestor of the giant panda. It measured 1 m (3 ft) in length; the modern giant panda grows to a size in excess of 1.5 m (5 ft). Wear patterns on its teeth suggest it lived on a die ...

''. Excavations from 1997 to 2006 have found additional stone tools and animal fossils including remains of 120 species of vertebrates, 116 of which are mammals. This suggests that the fossils originally existed in a subtropical forest environment. Remains of ''

Sinomastodon ''Sinomastodon'' ("Chinese mastodont") is an extinct gomphothere genus (of order Proboscidea), from the Late Miocene to the Early Pleistocene deposits of Asia ( China, Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, Kashmir, and Indonesia). It is not to be confus ...

'', ''

Nestoritherium ''Nestoritherium'' is an extinct genus of chalicothere; it has been dated to have lived from the late Miocene to the Early Pleistocene (11.6–0.781 mya). This range makes ''Nestoritherium'' one of the most recently dated chalicotheres. It has be ...

'', '' Equus yunnanensis'', ''

'' in the jaw suggested that its remains belonged to the earliest part of the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

or late

Pliocene The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58 Early reports of these excavation in Chinese journals did not garner attention from outside of China.Culotta E. (1995). Asian Hominids Grow Older. Science, 270: (5239), 1116-1117. In 1992,

Russell Ciochon Russell Ciochon (born March 11, 1948) is an American paleoanthropologist. He was born in Altadena, California and received three degrees (B.A. in 1971; M.A. in 1974; and PhD. in 1986) in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He ...

was invited to Longgupo to examine and provide a reliable age for the jaw. In 1995, Ciochon then published the findings in the journal ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

,'' which brought attention to the fossils on a global scale.

Initial doubts

In a 1995

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

report, several doubts about the specimens were raised. Upon seeing the specimens on a trip to China,

Milford Wolpoff Milford Howell Wolpoff is a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and its museum of Anthropology. He is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis that explains the evolution of ''H ...

of the University of Michigan is not convinced that the partial jaw is a hominid. He believed that the fossils might have belonged of an orangutan or ''Pongo,'' based on the shape of the missing neighboring tooth of a preserved premolar. Jeffrey Schwartz and

Ian Tattersall Ian Tattersall (born 1945) is a British-born American paleoanthropologist and a curator emeritus with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York. In addition to human evolution, Tattersall has worked extensively with lemur ...

also published a claim in Nature that the teeth found in Longgupo were those of an

orangutan Orangutans are great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. They are now found only in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, but during the Pleistocene they ranged throughout Southeast Asia and South China. Classified in the genus ...

. However, it was found that the teeth did not fit in the range of variation of those found in orangutans, which ruled out this possibility. More recently, it had been argued that the jaw fragment was indistinguishable from Late

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recen ...

-Pliocene Chinese apes of the genus ''

Lufengpithecus ''Lufengpithecus'' () is an extinct genus of ape in the subfamily Ponginae. It is known from thousands of dental remains and a few skulls and probably weighed about . It contains three species: ''L. lufengensis'', ''L. hudienensis'' and ''L. kei ...

''. The incisor was found to be more consistent with that of an East Asian person, who may have accidentally entered the fissure of the Longgupo Cave deposits of the because natural forces such as flowing water.

Retraction

In the 18 June 2009 issue of

who first reported the jaw fragment from Longgupo as human, announced his retraction of the findings. He is convinced that the Longgupo fossil do not belong to a pre-erectus human, but rather to unknown apes that originated from primal forests in Pleistocene Southeast Asia. He mentioned that ''H. erectus'' arrived in Asia about 1.6 million years ago, but steered clear of the forest in pursuit of grassland game, which means that the pre-''erectus'' species did not appear in southeast Asia.Ciochon RL. (2009). "The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia. ''Nature''. 459: 910-911. . This piece in Nature is based on a contribution to the forthcoming book" ''Out of Africa I: Who, When and Where?'' (eds, Fleagle, J. G. et al. Springer, 2009) Russell Ciochon no longer beliefs that ''Gigantopithecus'' and ''H. erectus'' coexisted in the same environment—an argument he had previously made in his book 1990 ''Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory''. He states:

Without the assumption that ''Gigantopithecus'' and ''H. erectus'' lived together, everything changed: if early humans were not part of the ''Stegodon''–''Ailuropoda'' fauna, I had to envision a chimpanzee-sized ape in its place — either a descendant of ''Lufengpithecus'', or a previously unknown ape genus.^{p. 911}

A key factor in changing his opinion about the fossil was a 2005 visit to the

Guangxi Natural History Museum Guangxi (; ; alternately romanized as Kwanghsi; ; za, Gvangjsih, italics=yes), officially the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in South China and bordering Vietnam ( ...

Nanning Nanning (; ; za, Namzningz) is the capital and largest city by population of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in Southern China. It is known as the "Green City" because of its abundance of lush subtropical foliage. Located in the South of ...

, where he examined a large number of primate teeth from the Pleistocene. He believes that early humans hunted mammals on grasslands and did not live in sub-tropic forests that existed at Longgupo in that period, making it impossible for the set of fossils to have belonged to a human. While Russell Ciochon no longer believes the jaw to belonged to a human, he still claims that the two stone tools found with fossils were created by humans. However, according to him, "They must have been more recent additions to the site."^p. 911 Jeffrey Schwartz, one of the critics of the original claim, found Ciochon's retraction astonishing since it is not a common occurrence that a scientist announces a retraction after changing his mind, praising the openness as something positive.

Importance

The discovery of the Wushan Man and its related materials such as stone various vertebrate fossils, and stone artifacts such as cores, points, scrapers, drilling tools, etc. show evidence of human agency. This is important because it suggests that the creators of these tools have made the change from tool-using to tool-making. According to Nature:

The new evidence suggests that hominids entered Asia before 2 Myr, coincident with the earliest diversification of genus ''Homo'' in Africa. Clearly, the first hominid to arrive in Asia was a species other than true ''H. erectus'', and one that possessed a stone-based technology. A pre-''erectus'' hominid in China as early as 1.9 Myr provides the most likely antecedents for the ''in situ'' evolution of ''Homo erectus'' in Asia.^{p. 278}

This makes its status as a ''Homo'' fossil critically important to the study of human origins as it suggests that ''H. erectus'' was not the first human species to leave Africa and supports the argument made by some that ''H. erectus'' evolved in Asia instead of Africa. The discovery of ''

Homo floresiensis ''Homo floresiensis'' also known as "Flores Man"; nicknamed "Hobbit") is an extinct species of small archaic human that inhabited the island of Flores, Indonesia, until the arrival of modern humans about 50,000 years ago. The remains of an i ...

'' is significant to this theory of pre-''erectus''

evolving in Asia. Recent research finds that its wrist and foot bones are anatomically like those of ''

H. habilis ''Homo habilis'' ("handy man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Early Pleistocene of East and South Africa about 2.31 million years ago to 1.65 million years ago (mya). Upon species description in 1964, ''H. habilis'' was highly c ...

'' or ''

Australopithecus ''Australopithecus'' (, ; ) is a genus of early hominins that existed in Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. The genus ''Homo'' (which includes modern humans) emerged within ''Australopithecus'', as sister to e.g. ''Australopi ...

''. Evidence for pre-''erectus'' ''Homo'' in Asia would be consistent with such a possible origin. A middle school textbook, ''The Chinese History'' (published by People's Education Press), has plans to include the discovery of "Wushan Man" as a part of its content.Ancient "Wushan Man" written into history textbook
(11 December 2003) EedOrbit

References