Bigfoot & Co, by Robert Matthews

UFOs, frogs falling out of the sky, the Beast of Exmoor - perfectly sensible people have reported seeing all these things at some time or other, but all have been rejected as utterly ridiculous by scientists.

They all have something else in common: despite the protests of the scientific community, there is nothing intrinsically impossible about any of these phenomena. One might not like the idea of the Earth being visited by aliens, say, but that's a long way from proving that such visits are impossible.

Happily, every so often new discoveries leave the know-it-alls scraping egg off their faces, such as the identification of 'rocks from the sky' - meteorites - as genuine chunks of interplanetary matter, and the discovery of the 'extinct' coelacanth swimming happily in the Indian Ocean.

For years, explorers and forest workers have claimed to have seen large, human like beasts stalking the Earth's wilder places, from Oregon to the Himalayas. Yet despite first-hand accounts and even photographs by people of the eminence and integrity of Sir John Hunt and Eric Shipton, the vast majority of scientists have no truck with the idea that we share this planet with another human like species.

Now those who have rejected sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot and other 'mythical' hominids may soon have to apologise, following new discoveries made at a remote site in Java.
According to tests on fossils found in Java, not one but three different human species co-existed on Earth around 35,000 years ago.
The theory of human evolution is notoriously controversial, but few palaeo-anthropologists doubt that modern humans - homo sapiens - are descended from homo erectus, a species which emerged in Africa around 1-6 million years ago.

Until now, no one has much worried about what happened to homo erectus - the general view is it just slowly evolved into homo sapiens as the millennia rolled by, finally disappearing around 300,000 years ago. But now radioactive dating tests carried obt by Carl Swisher of the Berkeley Geochronology Centre and his team are making that Darwinian disappearing act look a little too easy.
The researchers have been working on samples taken from a site at the Solo River in Java, where the skulls of 12 prehistoric hominids were found in the early 1930s.

Variously catalogued over the years as the remains of animals and humans, most palaeo-anthropologists now agree that they are remnants of homo erectus. To confirm this diagnosis, a number of research teams have tried to date the remains - a task made difficult by the reluctance of the Javanese authorities to allow test samples to be taken from the skulls. This has forced researchers to date samples taken from around where the skulls were found.

In 1985, a Japanese team dated the surrounding volcanic rock at around 250,000 years. While such a date is entirely consistent with the homo erectus picture, it could also be utterly irrelevant, as the origin of volcanic rock has little to do with the existence of humans. Swisher and his colleagues decided to get closer to dating the skulls themselves by tracking down animal teeth that were found alongside them. Using two independent methods, the team came up with an astonishing result: the teeth were no more than 53,000 years old, and could be a little as 27,000 years old.

In other words, homo erectus survived for 250,000 years longer than anyone thought - and not only failed to "fade away", but actually co-existed with modern humans.
The situation is more remarkable still, as there was a third species of hominid around 40,000 years ago: the Neanderthals. These hairy humanoids mysteriously vanished around 35,000 years ago - and not surprisingly, some have pinned the Yeti legend on the existence of die-hard Neanderthals in the Himalayas and elsewhere.

If Swisher and his team's dating results - reported last month in the journal Science - stand up, homo erectus managed to cling on almost 10 times longer in some parts of the world. All those supposedly "ludicrous" sightings of hairy men by mountaineers and the like suggest that for man and his close cousins, 1997 could just be business as usual on planet Earth.

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