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The 20,000 - yr - old fossilized bones of " Ushikawa Man , " thought to be some of Japan ’s most ancient human fossil , are not what scientist believed they were , raw inquiry finds .
rather , they are the finger cymbals of an ancient bear .
A stock photo of a bear fossil.
The fossils were found in the former fifties in the metropolis of Toyohashi , about 140 miles ( 225 kilometers ) southwestern United States of Tokyo . ButGen Suwa , an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo who led the new labor , recite Live Science that doubts about the Ushikawa fogey were first raised in the later 1980s , and had continued since then .
The young research , write Dec. 1 , 2024 in the journalAnthropological Science , express beyond a doubt that the bones are from an ancient brown bear , Suwa say in an email .
He added that the bones of bears were seldom found in archaeological web site in Japan from this time , and so Japanese scientists — including the paleontologists who found the fossils in the fifties — had a limited savvy of what bear bones could look like . Even so , these scientists had made " detailed and very accurate " descriptions , and also collected big number of fossilized pinched cadaver over several decades , Suwa say .
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.
come to : Ancient bone bring out antecedently unknown Japanese ancestors
Old bones in Japan
The fossil are named for the Ushikawa dominion of Toyohashi , where they were excavate during excavations at a prey between 1957 and 1959 . Suwa pronounce Japanese scientist at that time think a different os shard known as " Akashi Man " was the early human fogy from mainland Japan , perhaps more than 780,000 geezerhood old ; but the fossil was destroyed in an Allied breeze raid on Tokyo during World War II .
In the 1980s , an anatomic psychoanalysis in the eighties of a plaster cast of the lose Akashi fossil indicated it was probably a fragment of a late human sleeve pearl that had been wash into a different archaeological stratum and then mineralize . That finding led to with child attention on the Ushikawa fogey , Suwa said .
The Ushikawa fossils were initially presented as a humerus pearl from the upper weapon system and the end or head of a femur bone from the leg of a human who had lived more than 20,000 years ago . But in the novel study , a ocular test andcomputed tomography ( CT ) scanrevealed that the think human humerus was credibly the r bone from the forearm of a chocolate-brown bear ( Ursus arctos ) from about that time , while the head of the femur was also driven to be from a bear , Suwa suppose .
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 find that the Ushikawa fossil are not human mean theoldest human fossils found on the Japanese mainlandare from a limestone quarry near the Nipponese city of Hamakita , about 25 mile ( 40 klick ) eastward of Ushikawa .
They comprise fragments of a human leg bone , subdivision bone , collar off-white and skull that are thought to be from two dissimilar people — one who lived about 14,000 years ago and another who lived about 17,000 years ago .
— Hirota people of Japan intentionally deformed infant skull 1,800 years ago
— Doban - kun : A ' precious ' human - mold counting tool from prehistoric Japan
— Haunting ' mermaid ' mummy in Japan is probably a macabre monkey - fish mixture
Human fogy rest have also been found onJapan ’s Ryukyu Islands — also known as the Nansei Islands — situated about midway between Japan and Taiwan . Scientists think the youngest of these fossils date from about 18,000 yr ago , while the oldest may date from up to 32,000 years ago .
The in vogue finding in Japan is not the first clip thathuman and bear bone have been mix up : A bone found in a cave in Alaska in the 1990s was once think to be from a bear , but new enquiry has shown that it is from aNative American woman who last about 3,000 year ago .
