system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
A partial femur was found in China that points to a recent ancestor from 14,000 years ago. How do scientists know that the differences in the femur are a result of evolutionary precursors to modern humans and not a deformity of the femur in a modern human?
gpt
As always  in science  repetition validates results. It's possible  a single thigh bone could have a deformity, but if we start finding more and more bones from this time period or closely match other known specimens, and knowing how rare it is for something like that to be preserved in the first place, statistics say it's pretty  much certain that those are normal thigh bones from the period.