IF you have thirty minutes to spare this video is a worthwhile investment of that time. It concerns twelve skulls from the Solo River which, like Piltdown, have a confusion of modern and Erectus-level archaic features. Unlike Piltdown they're not fakes. But they're absent DNA, having been found in a humid tropic from 100kBC and not stored with 21st-century tech.
João Teixeira looks at the history of migrations, instead. 100kBC precedes out-of-Africa at least this far and this hard. But... it is also on the level of a million years after Erectus. By 2010 the best shot anyone had (since no Neanders lived here) was some sort of Erectus mutant. But a month later the Denisova caveman was identified and associated with deep Pacific Islanders and Aborigines/-als. The video ponders the what-if, the papers had been aware of each other.
Modern humans did not meet Erectus unless we're counting the Luzon and Flores dwarfs as, somehow, lost holdouts. They certainly did not intermarry. But Denisovans did intermarry with Erectus, at least their cousins southeast; some incredibly faint record of Erectus survives in those islands, through that event. The speculation we are asked to entertain is that these skulls represent the Erectus-[para]Denisovan hybrid, predominate Denisovan; on analogy of modern islanders being a Denisovan-African hybrid, predominant African.
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