Red Deer Cave people

The Red Deer Cave people were a prehistoric population of modern humans known from bones dated to between about 17,830 to c. 11,500 years ago, found in Red Deer Cave (Maludong, Chinese: 马鹿洞) and Longlin Cave in Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces, in Southwest China.

The fossils exhibit a mix of archaic and modern features and were tentatively thought to represent a late survival of an archaic human species, hybridization between Denisovan hominin and modern humans, or alternatively just "an unfortunate overinterpretation and misinterpretation of robust early modern humans, probably with affinities to modern Melanesians". A partial genome sequence by Zhang et al. in 2022 suggested that, despite their morphologically unusual features, they were modern humans related to contemporary populations in East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Americas. This DNA sequence was later brought into question, with the sequence possibly being contaminated by modern human DNA, followed up by a response in 2025 refuting this.

Evidence shows large deer were cooked in the Red Deer Cave, giving the people their name.

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