Mysterious New Human Coexisted with Neanderthals: Discovery News

      May 6, 2011 -- Neanderthals shared Europe with a mysterious member of our genus that may represent an entirely new species of human, suggests a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution. The study describes the recently unearthed remains of a hominid from what is now Serbia. The remains -- a fossilized jaw and teeth -- date to at least 113,000 years ago.
      "The specimen is primitive and does not show any Neanderthal-derived traits," lead author Mirjana Roksandic told Discovery News. "It could be a simple case of one non-representative member of a larger population that is morphologically primitive, or a representative member of a more primitive population that remained in the Balkans while Neanderthals developed in the rest of Europe."
     Roksandic, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Winnipeg, and her team have not, however, ruled out that the individual belonged to a new Homo species.
Europe appears to have been home to several such species over the past 1.7 million years, including Homo georgicus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis. End of article