The Ushikawa man fossils found in the late 1950s turns out not to be bona fide.
After the bones were discovered in a Toyohashi quarry in 1957 and 1959, they were reported to represent rare examples of Late Pleistocene human remains. However, doubts about the accuracy of that identification started bubbling up soon after the finding. Those concerns increased in the ‘90s, with some suggesting that the fossils might be animal, not human remains. But without any formal research, that hunch couldn’t be verified.
Now a team led by paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo’s University Museum and his colleagues have, after detailed analysis, confirmed that the bones came not from an ancient human, but a 20,000-year-old bear and reported their findings in the journal Anthropological Sciences.
