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The 20,000 - year - old ossified bone of " Ushikawa Man , " cerebrate to be some of Japan ’s most ancient human fossils , are not what scientist believed they were , new enquiry find .
Instead , they are the off-white of an ancient bear .
A stock photo of a bear fossil.
The fossils were found in the previous fifties in the metropolis of Toyohashi , about 140 international mile ( 225 klick ) sou'-west of Tokyo . ButGen Suwa , an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo who lead the newfangled project , told Live Science that doubts about the Ushikawa fogey were first invoke in the late 1980s , and had preserve since then .
The newfangled enquiry , published Dec. 1 , 2024 in the journalAnthropological Science , show beyond a doubt that the bone are from an ancient brown bear , Suwa said in an email .
He added that the castanets of bears were rarely found in archaeological sites in Japan from this time , and so Japanese scientists — including the paleontologists who found the fogy in the fifties — had a limited understanding of what bear os could search like . Even so , these scientist had made " detailed and very accurate " descriptions , and also amass big numbers racket of fossilized emaciated cadaver over several decades , Suwa said .
The new research has established that Japan’s “Ushikawa Man” fossils, once thought to be from a human who lived more than 20,000 years ago, are in fact from a bear.
associate : Ancient bones reveal antecedently unknown Japanese antecedent
Old bones in Japan
The dodo are mention for the Ushikawa territory of Toyohashi , where they were excavate during dig at a quarry between 1957 and 1959 . Suwa enunciate Japanese scientist at that time thought a different bone fragment roll in the hay as " Akashi Man " was the earliest human fossil from mainland Japan , perhaps more than 780,000 long time sometime ; but the fossil was destroyed in an Allied air raid on Tokyo during World War II .
In the 1980s , an anatomic psychoanalysis in the 1980s of a plaster cast of the lost Akashi fossil indicate it was probably a fragment of a late human weapon system off-white that had been moisten into a different archaeologic layer and then mineralized . That finding lead to greater aid on the Ushikawa fossils , Suwa said .
The Ushikawa fossil were initially lay out as a humerus bone from the upper arm and the end or school principal of a femur bone from the branch of a human who had lived more than 20,000 years ago . But in the new report , a visual examen andcomputed tomography ( CT ) scanrevealed that the speculate human humerus was probably the radius bone from the forearm of a brown bear ( Ursus arctos ) from about that fourth dimension , while the head of the femur was also driven to be from a bear , Suwa say .
The fossils were discovered in the late 1950s. They consist of a long bone thought to be from a human arm and the end or “head” of a leg bone.
Prehistoric fossils
The discovery that the Ushikawa fossils are not human means theoldest human fossils chance on the Japanese mainlandare from a limestone prey near the Nipponese city of Hamakita , about 25 miles ( 40 kilometre ) east of Ushikawa .
They contain sherd of a human leg os , arm off-white , collar bone and skull that are consider to be from two different people — one who hold out about 14,000 year ago and another who lived about 17,000 years ago .
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Human fogy remain have also been found onJapan ’s Ryukyu Islands — also known as the Nansei Islands — situated about Battle of Midway between Japan and Taiwan . scientist think the youngest of these fogy appointment from about 18,000 years ago , while the oldest may date stamp from up to 32,000 years ago .
The latest determination in Japan is not the first time thathuman and bear bones have been confused : A bone determine in a cave in Alaska in the nineties was once thought to be from a bear , but new enquiry has shown that it is from aNative American woman who lived about 3,000 years ago .
