Thigh bone points to unexpectedly long survival of ancient human ancestors

Partial femur found in the Red Deer Cave might show that a pre-modern species of human may have overlapped with modern humans into the ice age

A 14,000-year-old fragment of thigh bone found in a cave in China may represent evidence of the unexpected survival of long-vanished human ancestors.

If so, then right into and through the ice age, a creature that was either Homo habilis or Homo erectus survived alongside the Neanderthals, the unknown humans who left behind some DNA in a cave in Siberia, the mysterious so-called hobbit of the island of Flores in Indonesia, and modern Homo sapiens.