Enigma Man: A Stone Age Mystery

Around 50,000 years ago,

in a prehistoric forest of East Asia,

the first humans arrived from Africa to live and to hunt.

Just a few thousand individuals would become the ancestors

of all the people of East Asia, Australia and the Americas.

This vast land was thought to be empty

when they took their first steps here but now it appears

they were not alone.

This remote cave in Southwest China

is the final resting place of strange unknown humans.

Their remains had laid undisturbed for millennia

until a chance encounter brought them to light.

Now, we are faced with a shocking possibility.

We may have unearthed a new species of human.

In a way, it's the sort of thing you wouldn't ask for.

What we faced here was a discovery

that challenged everything we understood

about human evolution.

These ancient bones may change forever

our understanding of where we came from

and what makes us human.

On a quiet mountain road in the Chinese province of Yunnan,

two men from very different worlds are on a journey

back in time.

Ji Xueping, a Chinese paleontologist

is traveling with Australian paleoanthropologist,

Darren Curnoe.

They're on their way south to one of the most important

archaeological sites in Asia.

I've wanted to work in Asia my whole career.

I was at Asia these days where it's an amazing opportunity.

It's close to Australia that would help us understand

the origins of indigenous Australians

but also Asia in many ways seem to me to be

like a blank canvas particularly with the question

of the origins of modern humans.

Asia today has more than half the world's living population

but yet we know so little about their origins

and their relationship to people

in other parts of the world.

In 1989, mine workers accidentally

unearthed ancient looking human remains

at this site in Southern Yunnan.

They lay alongside bones of red deer

that once roamed this region.

Locals soon dubbed the site Maludong, the Red Deer Cave.

The mine's closed and the mysterious bones were moved

to a nearby museum.

There, they lay buried in the volts, unstudied

for almost 20 years.

Then in 2007, Ji invited Darren

to help investigate these fossils.

They were unlike any he had ever seen.

They were charred and strange and included part of a skull

with holes drilled into both sides.

This is the most complete skull from Maludong

and it's also the one that has the most events

from modification, alteration by humans.

The entire base of the skull has been cut off,

chipped away using stone tools and then they've used

another tool to smooth the edges and to actually polish it.

To understand what this skull cut means,

they called in an expert in ancient human habits.

Cultural anthropologist Paul Tacon.

Making of skull cups is a very modern form of behavior

and the Neanderthals didn't make skull containers,

all the other known examples past and present

were made from the skulls of modern humans.

Sometimes, these were made for use in ceremonies.

They sometimes were made from the skulls of enemies.

It was a way of insulting your enemy

by drinking from their skull.

Besides purposely shaping the edge of the skull

to make it into a nice container, two holes

were purposely drilled on either side

but not exactly in the center.

They're drilled close to the front of the skull

where most of the weight is.

So, the person who fashioned this was very ingenious.

They figured out that since there was more weight here,

put the holes closer to it,

it will sit nicely in the air without spilling.

For Paul, this was the handy work

of a sophisticated modern human,

but for Darren and Ji, the anatomy of the bones

told a different story.

When we started to look at the remains in detail,

it actually became very unsettling

because they're just so unusual.

In many ways they just look so primitive.

The shape of the eyebrow bone is really unusual,

very prominent and the brain case itself is really low

and very rounded.

These look like they should be one or two

or maybe even 300,000 years old.

The enigmatic features of the Red Deer Cave

fossils post puzzling questions about human origins

in this part of the world.

To date much of the focus on human evolution

has been a long way from Maludong,

across the world in Africa considered to be the birth place

of our direct ancestors and the cradle of all humanity.

So the first few million years of our evolution

were in Africa with this ape like two footed creatures

and they gave rise to Homo erectus.

Homo erectus is the first human like creature

to leave Africa.

It settled Europe and East Asia and survived in Asia

until about half a million years ago.

And we up here in the record, the fossil record

about 200,000 years ago

modern humans or Homo sapiens

and the subset of us left Africa about 80,000 years ago,

settled the rest of the planet

and gave rise to all living people.

The out of Africa story remains

the predominant theory for the origin of all human species.

Well, it's overwhelmingly

an African European story.

I think it's fair to say that there's been a bias

in our work for almost 100 years where most of the work

has been done in Africa and Europe or most of the evidence

has come from those places.

As our ancestors colonize the globe,

they entered unknown territories.

In Europe, they encountered the Neanderthals,

our closest ancient human cousins.

But most anthropologists believe that by the time

modern humans arrived in Asia,

all previous human species there had died out.

Then in 2004 on the island of Flores in Indonesia,

scientists discovered fossils of an ancient creature.

No more than a meter tall and with a tiny brain.

Homo floresiensis revolutionized the long pound theories

of human evolution.

It came to be known as the hobbit.

When the hobbit was found, many of us

just couldn't believe what was being proposed.

It was something that look like human like creatures

of three million years ago surviving until 17,000 years ago

in Indonesia are on a highland

with sophisticated culture.

It didn't make any sense.

The hobbit really threw things up in the air

because that was the first of its kind

being something really completely outlandish being found.

Professor Bert Roberts was part

of the original team that discovered the hobbit.

In the recent past, that was in the last few

tens of thousands of years, we thought it was

much simpler situation.

There's us Homo sapiens, there's Neanderthals

in Western Asia or in Europe and the rest of the world

was pretty much empty of other human species

and suddenly out of nowhere we got a brand new type of human

who's still surviving until very, very recently

and yet such an ancient design.

You think wow, if we can find this brand new species

just below the ground today,

how many are we missing out there?

Maybe we'll be misidentifying things in the past.

Maybe we just haven't been looking in the right places.

There are vast expanses

of unexplored territory across Asia.

Scientists have barely scratched the surface

of what lies beneath.

In 2008, Darren and Ji made their first journey

back to the Red Deer Cave.

We didn't really know how the site was.

When we started working here, there were suggestions

that it could had been towards the end of the Ice Age

that there was a very little chance

that it could have been considered be older

and that was an exciting prospect, exciting opportunity.

When you start digging a site like this,

you're aware of the fact that you're actually the first

people to be exposing things from the ground.

You're the first people to see these things

since the people who actually used the cave

tens of thousands of years ago.

And it gives you a real connection to your ancestors

to the way that we lived for millions of years

in our evolution.

And there's always the excitement if you don't know

what's gonna be revealed by the next stroke

of the trail of the brush there.

And what was revealed

were layers and layers of ash.

This ash is as fine as you would say

if the fire was built only last week.

It's really quite incredible.

The preservation is just extraordinary

and you can see pieces of charcoal

and these are in fact is actually burnt clay.

So it's soil that was on top of the fire.

It was so hot that it's baked it.

And when we look at the house we actually find animal bones

and animal teeth.

And so they've actually come in and they have cooked

particularly deer bones and then