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"There was a very good chance that there might have

Jan. 1, 2018 by Ella Pickett

"There was a very good chance that there might have been a small human-animal encounter, but it is just impossible to know for sure," explains Robert D. Lohman, a paleontologist at Arizona State University in Tucson, Arizona. "There's no way to know for sure if this was the typical human-animal encounter or not."

Dovidio and his colleagues found a piece of the skull, which they described as a skeleton of a "very small, small mammal." The team then proceeded to study the skull to learn more about how it evolved and how it developed over the millennia. The team found some similarities with those of modern-day humans, including the fact that the skull has a narrow, straight, and straight-backed upper jaw, which is similar to that of modern-day dogs and cats. This suggests that the human who was a hunter may have had some sort of interaction with the mammals, which were also found in the cave.

"The only other thing we can say is that I think these are very unique people. They were not hunters or scavengers, they were explorers," Dovidio says.

The researchers used the same method by which they studied the skeleton of a modern-day human, in which the skull was broken apart, to study the evolution of its skull type. So far, the bones of the modern-day human skeleton are not quite as striking as those of a saber-toothed cat. The two bones are the only ones that match the shape of the skull and jaw found in the remains of the cave.

Dovidio says that the team's results are promising because they "tend to support our hypothesis that the modern-day human could have had a very important role in spreading the Americas" with their discovery.

Although there are several other possible causes for the unusual finding, this is not one of them. Lohman says, "It's a great surprise that this is a fossil of a person who left a small footprint and did not have any other footprints or footprints on his body. The whole point is that the human footprint is a unique artifact of the Americas."