Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #4

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Could cannibalism be at the heart

of the Red Deer Cave mystery?

Within the cave's walls

are whispering echoes

of a macabre event and clues

that don't make scientific sense.

The human remains from Red Deer Cave

had become a Stone Age

mystery and this mystery

was about to get a lot more complicated.

In 1996 while moving artifact

from a provincial museum

to its institute, Ji

noticed a curious block

of rock on a shelf.

The rock had been discovered

by a lone geologist

at a place called Longlin, 300 kilometers

northeast of Red Deer Cave.

It had sat on the shelf

unnoticed for three decades.

Ji said he had something to show me,

a surprise, a little present.

Ji was holding a rock that

had a skull inside it.

I looked at it and thought what is this,

this look like something

that could be hundreds

of thousands of years old.

Why is he showing me this?

What does he wanna do with this?

And that moment actually changed the course

of our research together.

They had just unlocked the door

into China's mysterious

collections when Ji discovered

yet another forgotten fossil

from the Longlin site.

It was a big surprise because I didn't know

that there was a jaw but also

they've been put together

in such a way that that actually

made an artificial chin,

a fake chin look like a modern human.

And Ji and I studied it really carefully

and we actually found that

the bones fitted together

naturally in quite a different way

and we had a very different looking jaw.

It would take two years of pain staking

reconstruction but finally

the skull was liberated

from the rock.

It was the weirdest looking

thing I've ever seen.

Darren is convinced it

belongs with the jaw.

What did I see?

Something I've made up.

I was confused, I was

elated, I was perplexed.

It had this really bizarre mix

of features, unexpected mix.

There were hints of modern human features.

There were these really

ancient looking features.

In my own mind I didn't know

what I was gonna do with this.

This confusing mix of features

bears a striking resemblance to those found

in the fossils from Maludong.

So we thought that the

best way to approach this

given that we thought

they were quite similar

was to have them in the same population,

have them as belonging to the same group.

Now, Darren and Ji are confronted

with someone or perhaps something

they really did not expect to meet.

They had come face to face

with the Red Deer Cave people.

This primitive looking creature once ran

to the prehistoric forests of Yunnan.

The question is, just how long ago?

That face, I mean that's not

a modern human face, that

level of projection like that

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