The Red Deer Cave people were a group of early humans whose bones have been dated to between about 17,830 and 11,500 years ago. These remains were found in Red Deer Cave (also called Maludong, Chinese: 马鹿洞) and Longlin Cave in Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces in Southwest China.
The fossils show a mix of ancient and modern traits. Some scientists thought they might be a late group of an older human species, a mix of Denisovan humans and modern humans, or simply a misunderstanding of early modern humans who looked strong and had traits similar to modern Melanesians. A study in 2022 examined part of their DNA and suggested they were modern humans related to people living today in East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Americas. However, this DNA result was later questioned because it might have been mixed with modern human DNA. A response in 2025 later denied this possibility.
Evidence shows that large deer were cooked in the Red Deer Cave, which is how the group got its name.
Discovery and dating
In 1979, petroleum geologist Li Changqing found a block of fine-grained sediments with human remains, animal fossils, charcoal, and burnt clay in a cave near De'e, Longlin County, Guangxi Province, China. These remains were classified as a single specimen, LL-1. He sent them quickly to Kunming, Yunnan Province, for further study. There, a mandible (lower jawbone) and some body bones were removed. In 1989, human remains were also found during an excavation at the Red Deer Cave near Mengzi City, Yunnan Province. Researchers did not fully understand the importance of these discoveries until 2008, when Darren Curnoe, Ji Xueping, and colleagues began studying and dating East Asian human fossils to better understand the poorly documented Asian archaeological record. They discovered that the Red Deer Cave and Longlin people had a mix of modern and ancient traits, yet lived much more recently than expected. Charcoal inside the braincase of Red Deer Cave specimens was dated using uranium–thorium dating to between 17,830 and 13,290 years ago, and LL-1 was dated to 11,510 years ago. In 2008, excavations at Longlin Cave were restarted, but most of the known material had already been recovered during the first dig. In 2010, researchers successfully removed the remaining skull and body fossils from the Red Deer Cave block.
The dating of these bones has caused disagreement among scientists. Before DNA testing, the bones' anatomy suggested they belonged to ancient humans, such as early Homo erectus or Homo habilis, who lived about 1.5 million years ago in Africa. In 2013, Curnoe, Ji, and colleagues proposed that the cave people might represent a new species. In 2015, they suggested the Red Deer Cave people may have been a mix of early modern humans and one or more unknown ancient species, due to their unique combination of modern and ancient traits. Modern humans may have arrived in China as early as 130,000 years ago, as shown by the Zhirendong remains, though the classification of these early specimens remains debated. That same year, they concluded that the femur (thigh bone) of the Red Deer Cave people was unlike that of modern humans, suggesting they were ancient. They proposed the Red Deer Cave people could be related to the Denisovans, a poorly understood group of late-surviving Homo that lived across Asia, or to an early branch of Homo that left Africa and did not develop a fully modern human body structure, like the Dmanisi hominins. This possibility has also been suggested for H. floresiensis, which survived recently on the island of Flores. Researchers speculated that the Red Deer Cave people may have survived for a similar reason, due to isolation in mountainous regions.
Anatomy
The fossils are relatively young but show features similar to early humans. The Red Deer Cave people had unique traits that differ from modern humans, such as a flat face, wide nose, a jaw that sticks out without a chin, large back teeth, strong eyebrows, thick skull bones, and a brain that was average in size. Like some other early humans, their bodies were small, with an estimated weight of 50 kilograms (110 pounds). Their traits were also unusual compared to other human skulls from the Late Pleistocene era.
Earlier research by Curnoe showed that the bones and teeth closely resemble those of early humans. The height of the front part of the lower jaw was 27.7 millimeters (about 1.09 inches), which is within the range of modern humans. The thickness of this area was 12.5 millimeters (about 0.49 inches), similar to Neanderthals and early modern humans. The holes in the lower jaw, called mental foramina, were located 26.9 millimeters (about 1.06 inches) from the bottom, which is lower than the typical position in modern humans and Neanderthals (usually above 30 millimeters or 1.2 inches). The height and thickness of the first two molars were nearly the same as those of Upper Palaeolithic Asians, but the molars themselves were broader, like those of Neanderthals or earlier humans.
The femur (thigh bone) from the Red Deer Cave is very old, showing traits no longer found in modern humans. A specific part of the femur, near the lesser trochanter, has a round shape and thin bone structure, which weakens its ability to handle heavy forces. The middle part of the femur is narrow, suggesting the person may have been short. The femur also has a moderate pilaster value index, which measures the strength of a bone ridge, and this value is much lower than in modern humans. Overall, the femur resembles bones from much older Lower Pleistocene humans.
The reconstructed femur from Maludong shows it was very small. The outer layer of the bone was thin, and the areas under the most stress, along with the femur neck, were longer. The part where the main hip flexor muscle attached (the lesser trochanter) was strong and angled strongly backward.
Classification and archaeogenetics
Scientists initially thought the Red Deer Cave people might be a very old group of humans, but they were hesitant to call them a completely new or little-known species. The bones found in the Red Deer Cave show physical features similar to older human groups like Homo erectus and Homo habilis. In particular, the Red Deer Cave specimen looked most like a fossil called KNM-ER 1481, which was part of Homo erectus and lived in Africa about 1.89 million years ago. Some of the bones also looked a bit like those of Australopithecus, a group that is not part of the Homo genus. Scientists also considered the possibility that these remains might result from mixing between Denisovans and modern humans or could be a group of modern humans with unusual physical traits.
One idea was that the Red Deer Cave people arrived in the area more than 100,000 years ago and became separated from other groups. The high mountains and deep valleys of Southwest China could have helped isolate species over time. The region’s environment is also unique because of the movement of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
In July 2022, scientists successfully studied ancient DNA from the skull of a Red Deer Cave person called Mengzi Ren (MZR). This DNA showed that the person was part of a group of modern humans closely related to ancient people from Southern East Asia. The MZR specimen also had genetic links to modern East Asians and, to a smaller degree, Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This suggests that people similar to MZR might have passed genes to the ancestors of Native Americans before they became isolated in Beringia. The MZR person also belonged to a genetic group called haplogroup M9, which likely originated in South Asia about 47,000–50,000 years ago. However, later studies have questioned the connection between MZR and Native American populations.
Bones found in the Longlin Cave in Guangxi belong to a different group called the "Longlin lineage" or "Guangxi ancestry." This group is different from the MZR specimen. The Longlin lineage is related to both ancient Northern and Southern East Asian groups but is more closely connected to them than to older East Asian groups like the Tianyuan, Hoabinhian, and Papuan populations. The Longlin lineage also shares a closer genetic link with the Jōmon people of Japan, who are similarly connected to both Northern and Southern East Asian groups. This suggests the Longlin and Jōmon lineages separated from the main East Asian group at about the same time. However, the Longlin and Jōmon lineages have different relationships with other groups. A study by Wang et al. in 2025 found that the Longlin lineage may have come from a mix of two groups: one related to an older Asian lineage (Xingyi_EN) and another related to Southern East Asians (Qihe3-like).
Although the Longlin lineage does not appear to be part of modern human groups, a 9,000-year-old bone from the Dushan Cave shows that this person had about 17% ancestry from the Longlin lineage, with the rest coming from a group similar to people from Fujian during the Neolithic period. This "Dushan ancestry" was also found in people from Southeast Asia who lived between 8,300 and 6,400 years ago. These individuals had about 72% Dushan ancestry and 28% from an older East Asian group linked to the Hoabinhian culture. This ancestry might be connected to early Austroasiatic-speaking people. More recently, Austroasiatic speakers have been linked to a new genetic group found in Central Yunnan (Xingyi_LN), which is closely related to both ancient Northern and Southern East Asians but is distinct from them.