200,000 Year-Old Human Hair Reported Found in Fossil Hyena Dung

200,000 year old human hair found in dung - Telegraph

The Telegraph is reporting on a find made near Sterkfontein in South Africa, where Dr Lucinda Backwell and colleagues from the University of Witwatersrand have found what they believe to be the oldest intact human hair, dating back to a time immediately prior to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, around 195,000 years ago.

The find is reported in Journal of Archaeological Science, and although the paper is behind a paywall, the abstract is available, and reads thus...

Until now, the oldest known human hair was from a 9000-year-old South American mummy. Here we report fossil hairs of probable human origin that exceed that age by about 200,000 years. The hairs have been discovered in a brown hyaena (Parahyaena brunnea) coprolite from Gladysvale cave in South Africa. The coprolite is part of a hyaena latrine preserved in calcified cave sediment dated between 195,000 and 257,000 years ago. This find supports the hypothesis that hyaenas accumulated some of the early hominin remains found in cave sites, and provides a new source of information on Pleistocene mammals in the Sterkfontein Valley.

The find seems fairly securely dated, and its rarity and possible significance are explained by Dr. Backwell, speaking to The Telegraph...

"This find is so unusual as the human fossil record at this time is exceedingly poor, and of course hair is relatively fragile and degrades easily. It is the first non-bony material in the early hominid fossil record. "As analytical techniques become more advanced they could shed light on what the person looked like, their state of health, and other aspects that cannot be investigated with current technologies."

Until now, the oldest known human hairs recovered by archaeologists date back 9,000 years to the oldest known (Chincorro) mummies, (PDF) from which hair belonging to a 3-year-old child was recovered.

This recent find at Gladysvale Cave comprises 40 strands of hair, which after comparison with samples from modern humans, primates and other species, were found to most closely resemble those of hominids. In this case, it is speculated that the hairs might have belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a robust species of archaic human, although for reasons not entirely clear, there are thoughts that the hairs might even belong to an as yet unknown species of Homo.

The coprolites came from the brown hyena, Parahyaena brunnea, which were discovered in the context of an ancient hyena latrine in Gladysvale Cave, which over the past 8 decades has attracted the attention of palaeontologists, a site which has yielded an estimated 250,00 ancient fossils, including a 1.6 million year-old giant hyena skull, two teeth belonging to A. Africanus, and a find which apparently went missing, a hominid mandible reported to Robert Broom in the mid-1930s, that had vanished from the cave wall in which it was said to have been embedded, by the time he had got there to investigate.

Thus far it has not been possible to recover anything in the nature of genetic material from the samples, such as DNA, which would of course prove to be both highly interesting and revelatory, but it is hoped that future technologies, combined with similar finds may prove an unexpected source of illumination in our search for ever more clues to our own ancestors and the environments in which they resided.



Reference: “Probable human hair found in a fossil hyaena coprolite from Gladysvale cave, South Africa”. Lucinda Backwell, Robyn Pickering, Don Brothwell, Lee Berger, Michael Witcomb, David Martill, Kirsty Penkman, Andrew Wilson. Journal of Archaeological Science. Volume 36, Issue 6, June 2009, Pages 1269-1276.

via Leherensuge and Mundo Neandertal

image from Mundo Neandertal

see also: BBC News - Hyena Giggles No Laughing Matter