5 Times Scientists Mistook Animals For Humans

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Throughout the long and difficult process of human evolution, many different populations and even species of humans have arisen and subsequently gone extinct. Today, with the exception of the Cornish and Donald Trump, all people on the planet belong to a single species, Homo sapiens. But depending on which researcher you ask, there have either been just a handful or many distinct human species that have existed through time. These waring factions of researchers belong to two teams, lumpers and splitters. The lumpers believe that most human fossils uncovered belong to just a few species of human, mainly belonging to our own species or the much older Homo erectus. The splitters believe that quite a lot of human species existed and that a lot of these disconnected human groups throughout time in fact evolved into their own unique species. Now of course a lot of researchers choose to linger in between these two factions and today the general consensus is that there were once quite a few human species. Homonyis homohabilis homo floresiansis these were all different species that once existed but through differing reasons no longer do. But there's a dark side to the splitter faction. Throughout the history of paleoanthropology, some researchers have chosen to create new human species based on fossils that were never even human to begin with.

[00:01:34]>> In 1982, paleontologist Yoseep Gibbit uncovered a small portion of a skull at the archaeological site of Venttomy in Osir, southern Spain. Immediately suspecting it to belong to a species of extinct human, the team took the skull fragment to Sabadel Institute of Paleontology and sought advice from fellow paleontologists Raphael Adroa, Pierre Main, and Peter Andrews. All of which agreeing that this skull fragment belonged to a human. This immediately set the ball rolling and the team pushed their initial finding, describing this oray man as the oldest human fossil ever found in Europe.

[00:02:13]From the start, however, not everybody was convinced. That same year, the team invited Marie Antulet, not the one you're thinking of, and Henry Delumi to view further excavations at the site.

[00:02:26]This being the first time genuine paleo anthropologists were involved in the project. The following year, further preparations on the skull piece revealed some curious features that sparked skepticism with the Dumblies. Once the skull was freed from its matrix and properly cleaned, it revealed certain features that Marie Antuinet identified as definitely ecquinine.

[00:02:50]Firstly, was the presence of a notable occipital crest, something common in other animals, especially horses, but far rarer in humans, including extinct species. They also discovered an internal coronial structure, a fusion of the skull that terminates just behind the zygomatic arch or the temples. This means the skull fragment should actually be placed at the top of the head or where the forehead would be for our species. And I got a big forehead, so I know what I'm talking about. This would make it No, this would make it match no other human fossil ever discovered. But it does follow the shape of, you guessed it, an ecquin skull. Its general shape and curvature also did not match adult humans. And you can see that pretty clearly in this image here. It is placed with a replica of KNM 3883, a partial skull from Lake Takana belonging to Homer erectus. You can see that even if this were from the back of the skull, it just doesn't really match at all. So after a lot of subsequent drama, controversy and changing of sides, the orcranium is now almost unanimously agreed to belong to a species of ecquin. Probably the extinct species equis altoadens, a type of early donkey from the middle plea scene of western Europe. That is, get this, an extremely common find at venta missenna.

[00:04:19]Gert passed away in 2007 adamant to his last breath that the skull he found was in fact human. The sad part about this story is that just six years after after his death, a genuine human fossil was found in Orce, a single milk tooth dated to be around 1.4 million years old and probably representing a homo erectus to hide began against his transition. It turns out Ors really did contain some of the oldest human fossils from Europe. So while Gibbert didn't find an extinct human fossil, it turns out he wasn't looking in the wrong place in the end.

[00:04:56]That was quite hot.

[00:05:04]Let's go further back in history now.

[00:05:06]During the infancy of paleontology in 1726, Swiss natural scientist Johan Jacob Schwitzer described this crushed and all-around messed up skeleton as a new species of human homo dilvou testice, which translates to the man witnessed to the flood. He believed this was the skeleton of a child who was squashed flat in the biblical flood event. This ties into something we'll get on to in a moment. So for now, just keep in mind that at this point in time, effectively all fossils were interpreted as evidence of life and extinction before and during the deluge. Now, I like to think that Schwitzer had never actually seen a child's skeleton before because there is literally no way a human skeleton could be manipulated to resemble anything close to this fossil.

[00:05:57]In fact, this fossil is remarkably well preserved, and so it looks nearly identical now to how it would have before the process of fossilization even began. I also like to think that Schwitzer had never seen a salamander skeleton before, because this is nearly identical to that.

[00:06:17]Following nearly a century of scrutiny and more reasonable identifications, the skeleton was finally correctly identified. In 1908, zoologologist and madman Horge Kuvier further prepared the fossil to reveal its tiny front legs.

[00:06:32]With this extra feature to go off, Kuier correctly announced that the skeleton was simply that of a giant type of salamander, not a human. To give Schwitzer some credit though, he did have less to go off for his identification because the species he had found had never been discovered before. In fact, today this same skeleton is the holotype of its own species. The defining specimen in which all other findings of this species are based on. This skeleton originally belonged to Andreas Schoitzer, a type of extinct giant salamander that existed for nearly 30 million years from the iligosine to the plyene of Europe. And yes, you may have noticed this species name was created to honor its original, albeit incorrect, describer. The genus Andreas still persists today in fact and contains the largest living species of salamander that can be found in Asia.

[00:07:25]But Homo Dilvites has a bit of its own legacy. Even after Schwitzer's fossil was correctly identified, the term was still used not to identify any messed up skeletons, but instead to refer to the concept of pre-deluge humans. The antiquity of humanity as it is known was one of the longest and most intense debates in natural history where the question abounding in nearly every natural scientist's head was when did humans first appear. For a long time it was assumed that humans only really started to thrive after the biblical flood and the remains of extinct animals that predate this flood are from a time from far before humans or the creation of Adam and Eve. Rare finds like the red skeleton of Pavaland that may date to before the arrival of humans 6,000 years ago were deemed as homodil vouy testus not really as their own species but as a kind of boundary point for the ideas that humans may be far older than originally thought. This debate is fascinating and may be something we can make a whole video on if you're interested in the future.

[00:08:33]>> How do I answer this phone? It's John Port. Very important. So when I was in school in biology, we would have to dissect organs and most of the time we would use pig organs as a standin for human ones. As biologically pigs are pretty similar in terms of their simple morphology to humans. So much so as it turns out that it can lead to some pretty major misidentifications in paleo anthropology. In 1917, Harold Cook discovered a single worn and damaged tooth from the Snake Creek beds in Nebraska. He introduced the tooth five years later to Dr. Henry Osborne, and the two were in agreement that it belonged to a type of large primate, possibly even a species of extinct human. And so, the name Hesperipythecus Harold Cookie was invented. And yes, that name is terrible. And a huge ego stroke. My god, it's a mouthful. Pretty quickly, the specimen was dramaticized in the press and scientific publications, and the initial observation that this might belong to a species of ape related to modern humans, was majorly capitalized upon.

[00:09:45]Illustrations for the find were based closely on the Java man, the holotype for the early human species Homo erectus. Credit to Osborne, though he didn't agree with this sketch and thought it was way too humanl looking.

[00:09:58]Over the coming years, more discoveries from the original site were made, including more human teeth. Following this, suspicions were thoroughly aroused, and after careful identification, it was found that these teeth were, you guessed it, not human.

[00:10:12]Every feature of the tooth, from the shape of the root, the wear patterns, and the thickness of the enamel points to this belonging to, not us, not to an ape, but to an extinct species of peckery in the genus prophanops.

[00:10:25]Proththeanops. Prothanops. Proththenots.

[00:10:29]Basically, these were pig teeth, not human. This case seems to be less due to human error or misidentification, but more to it being blown out of proportion.

[00:10:46]In 1908, paleontologist Florentino Amino discovered two bones, an atlas and a feur from the plyene sediments near Monte Kamosa, Argentina. The atlas was incredibly well preserved while the femur left a little bit to be desired.

[00:11:02]And Makino used these bones to describe the genus I just spat everywhere. I'm not including that. And Makino used these bones to describe the genus and species Tetra Protomo Argentinis, an extremely early human that lived during the plyioene in South America. This would have been a huge discovery placing South America as the continent of origin for humans rather than Africa. There's a pretty glaring issue with this idea, however. No apes, living or extinct, other than our own species, have ever been found in either of the American continents. That brings a pretty serious problem to Amino's claim because how would we have evolved there? What could we have possibly evolved from? Amino falls into the classic trap of early anthropology to explain this problem, scientific racism. He explained that while great apes did evolve in Africa, they quickly spread out and hybridized with other ape species to create the modern human populations. So yes, he's arguing that different human populations were distinct species, notably claiming that people native to Africa, which he called Homour, which literally translates to dull black man, evolved from very early apes. Very ghastly stuff and obviously completely wrong. All humans alive today of course belong to one single species homo sapiens beside the Cornish remember. So obviously the Monte Hamoso bones were not from an ancient human. Now the atlas was actually from a real human just a much much more recent nonfossilized bone likely from an indigenous person from South America who perished no more than a few hundred years prior. The feur, however, is where it gets juicy. The femur is not human, nor is it ape. We can narrow it down most closely to belonging to a member of the order carnivora, which includes an absolutely enormous collection of mammals, including bears, dogs, cats, and seals.

[00:13:03]The preservation of the feur is pretty shoddy, and it also seems to be a genuine plyiosene fossil, making its identification nearly impossible. For a long time, the general idea was that this belonged to a member of the family pro-sion day, which mainly includes raccoons. This would have been especially embarrassing because Amino was supposedly considered one of the leading experts on the fossil pro-sinids of South America. So, you'd think he would have picked that up. Since then, however, it has been suggested that the FEMA is too undiagnostic to identify that specifically. Some have even suggested it shows features more similar to the super family fellow day, which as you can guess includes cats as well as hyenas. Whatever the identity of the feur, it's pretty clear that these two bones did not come from the same individual. They were certainly separated by millions of years and multiple jumps on the taxonomic tree.

[00:14:09]And finally, here is one of our personal favorite cases in taxonomic confusion.

[00:14:14]This story is longer and complex, and we won't be covering all of it in the video. It deserves being talked about further in another video, maybe even on its own if you'd like. But for now, from the mid to late 20th century, a series of cranial and mandibular fragments of a large individual were discovered on the island of Java in Indonesia. From the initial portion of mandible discovered in 1941, it was clear this individual would have been huge. Estimates placed the complete jaw as slightly smaller than that of Gigantopithecus, the largest species of ape to have ever lived, but still larger than any modern ape, including gorillas.

[00:14:53]Leave that in. Original investigator France Widenrike concluded that the individual was a type of giant ape similar to Gigantopycus but around 2/3 the size. He created the name Meganthropus Paleo Javannicus, nicknaming it the Java giant. Further finds challenge this view. However, many authors argue that further specimens actually fell well within the range of members of our own genus. As you may remember from before, Java yielded the holotype of Homo erectus and the island seems to have been home to a decentsized population for an extremely long period of time. For this reason, a lot of authors argue that these fossils are actually just very large Homo erectus individuals. Others argue, however, that these bones are still too large to be typical Homoerectus and instead assign them to their own subspecies or species Homo PaleoGanicus.

[00:15:50]So for quite some time and indeed sometimes even now it has been believed that giant humans either belonging to Homo erectus or their own species entirely made their home on the island of Java. Others have argued otherwise, explaining that these large jewels don't necessarily mean these human relatives were overall really big and instead suggest that they belonged to a species of Oralopythesine, possibly even a member of the robust Oralopythesis Panthropus, which would be the first discovery of either of these genera outside of Africa. Some jaws are rather gray, however, and here lies a crucial turn in the story. Some authors actually argue that Widenrike was right all along. These skull and mandible parts are sometimes supposedly too large to belong to a human and sometimes too gray to belong to paranthropus. They do fit quite nicely, however, with the idea of a giant nonhuman primate. Currently believed to be closely related with lufang pythecus. Studies in the last 10 years have found it to be completely within the realm of a large homminid, possibly meaning the genus Meganthropus may come back into play. So there you have it, a brief history of times fossil skeletal remains were incorrectly identified as human. And who would have guessed humans were once salamanders, horses, pigs, and so much more. All jokes aside, these early mistakes that led to heated scientific debate in what is what derives science onwards and we cannot look back at these identifications with too much contempt as their mistakes are what allow us to make our correct identifications today.

[00:17:33]That being said, however, when it comes to human evolution, it's usually more complex. Many of these early conclusions were made with preconceptions in mind frequently racist in nature. Early scientists simply did not want to entertain the possibility that all humans came out of Africa and that indeed we all once had dark skin. As much as I would like to say we've moved on from this, unfortunately we have not.

[00:17:59]That kind of scientific racism is still present in people's minds today. I always encourage critical thinking and doing your own research. Read the raw data and come to your own conclusions.

[00:18:10]Don't just believe whatever hits the news. Thank you so much for watching everybody. I hope you enjoyed. Please like, subscribe, and comment. And also be sure to check out my Instagram and Tik Tok. I truly appreciate all the support and love I've had so far. I have loads planned for the future, so keep an eye out. Until next time. Keep reading, I guess.

[00:18:36]Meanthropus Paleo Javannicus, nicknaming it the Java Giant.

[00:18:47]What?

[00:18:48]>> Stop moving.

[00:18:52]Okay.