200,000 Year Old Human Hair Discovered?

[Favonius Cornelius]

200,000 year old human hair found in dung

 

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

 

 

Palaeontologists found 40 strands of fossilised hair inside samples of coprolite, or fossilised dung, from a cave in South Africa that was used by brown hyaenas.

 

Until now the oldest samples of human hair were from a 9,000 year old mummy found in northern Chile. It is extremely rare for soft tissue such as hair, skin and muscle to survive more than a few hundred years and only hard tissue like bone is fossilised normally.

 

But scientists believe the new samples of hair are the remains of an early species of human that was scavenged by hyaenas after death, allowing the delicate hairs to be preserved inside the dung as it fossilised.

 

 

 

As reported at Telegraph.co.uk...

[sylla]

But scientists believe the new samples of hair are the remains of an early species of human that was scavenged by hyaenas after death, allowing the delicate hairs to be preserved inside the dung as it fossilised.As reported at Telegraph.co.uk...

QUOTE: "Dr Backwell added: "Brown hyaenas are scavengers, not hunters, so the hominid was dead by the time the hyena came upon it..."

 

These scientists seem to be as pious as they are misinformed; hyenids are actually far more predators than scavengers, and a tiny human would have had very little chance against a carnivore that regularly hunted medium to large sized ungulates.