A stock image of a bear fossil. (Image credit: Fabio Di Natale through Alamy Stock Photo)
The 20,000-year-old fossilized bones of “Ushikawa Man,” believed to be a few of Japan's a lot of ancient human fossils, are not what researchers thought they were, brand-new research study discovers.
Rather, they are the bones of an ancient bear.
The fossils were discovered in the late 1950s in the city of Toyohashi, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo. Gen Suwa, an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo who led the brand-new job, informed Live Science that questions about the Ushikawa fossils were very first raised in the late 1980s, and had actually continued considering that then.
The brand-new research study, released Dec. 1, 2024 in the journal Anthropological Science, reveals beyond a doubt that the bones are from an ancient brown bear, Suwa stated in an e-mail.
He included that the bones of bears were seldom discovered in historical sites in Japan from this time, therefore Japanese researchers– consisting of the paleontologists who discovered the fossils in the 1950s– had a minimal understanding of what bear bones might appear like. However, these researchers had actually made “comprehensive and extremely precise” descriptions, and likewise gathered great deals of fossilized skeletal remains over a number of years, Suwa stated.
Related: Ancient bones expose formerly unidentified Japanese forefathers
The brand-new research study has actually developed that Japan's “Ushikawa Man” fossils, as soon as believed to be from a human who lived more than 20,000 years back, remain in truth from a bear. (Image credit: Anthropology and Prehistory Division, University Museum, University of Tokyo)Old bones in Japan
The fossils are called for the Ushikawa district of Toyohashi, where they were uncovered throughout excavations at a quarry in between 1957 and 1959. Suwa stated Japanese researchers at that time believed a various bone piece referred to as “Akashi Man” was the earliest human fossil from mainland Japan, possibly more than 780,000 years of ages; however the fossil was damaged in an Allied air raid on Tokyo throughout World War II.
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In the 1980s, a physiological analysis in the 1980s of a cast of the lost Akashi fossil suggested it was most likely a piece of a current human arm bone that had actually been cleaned into a various historical layer and after that mineralized. That finding resulted in higher attention on the Ushikawa fossils, Suwa stated.
The Ushikawa fossils were at first provided as a humerus bone from the arm and completion or head of a thigh bone from the leg of a human who had actually lived more than 20,000 years back. In the brand-new research study, a visual evaluation and calculated tomography (CT) scan exposed that the expected human humerus was most likely the radius bone from the lower arm of a brown bear (Ursus arctosfrom about that time, while the head of the thigh was likewise identified to be from a bear,
