200,000-year-old human hair found in dung

Palaeontologists have discovered strands of hair belonging to a human who lived 200,000 years ago in fossilized hyena dung from a cave in South Africa. Lucinda Backwell, a palaeontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, found 40 strands of hair preserved inside the dung. “This find is so unusual as the human fossil record at this time is exceedingly poor, and of course hair is fragile and degrades easily. It is the first non-bony material in the early hominid fossil record,” Backwell said. Experts think it could belong to the first Homo sapiens who evolved 195,000 years ago but the possibility that it could come from a totally new human species was also not ignored.

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