An almost perfectly preserved skull for more than 140,000 years in northeast China represents a new species of ancient humans more closely related to us than Neanderthals – and could fundamentally change our understanding of human evolution, scientists say Friday.
According to Al Jazeera, the Telegraph reports, the skull belonged to a man with a large brain in his 50s with deeply set eyes and thick eyebrow ridges. Although his face was wide, he had flat, low cheekbones that made him resemble modern humans more than other missing members of the human family tree.
The research team has linked the species to other Chinese fossil finds and is calling the species Homo longi or “Dragon Man”, a reference to the region where it was discovered.
The Harbin skull was first found in 1933 in the town of the same name, but is said to have been hidden in a well for 85 years to protect it from the Japanese army.
It was later excavated and handed over to Ji Qiang, a professor at Hebei GEO University, in 2018.
“From our analysis, the Harbin group is more closely associated with Homo sapiens than Neanderthals,” said co-author Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
Species ‘sister’
That, he said, would make Dragon Man “our sister species” and a closer ancestor of modern man than Neanderthals.
The findings were published in three papers in The Innovation magazine. The skull dates back at least 146 thousand years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene.
The name is derived from Long Jiang, which means “Dragon River”.
Dragon Man, probably lived in a wooded aquatic environment as part of a small community.
Given the location where the skull was found, as well as the tall man, the team believes Homo longi could have adapted well to harsh environments and would have been able to disperse throughout Asia.
Next genetic ranking
The researchers first studied the skull, identifying more than 600 traits they nurtured in a computer model that developed millions of simulations to determine evolutionary history and relationships between different species.
“These suggest that Harbin and several other fossils from China formed a third race of later humans along with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” Stringer explained.
Other finds include a fossilized skull from the Chinese province of Dali thought to be 200,000 years old and found in 1978, and a jaw found in Tibet dating back 160,000 years.
Stringer explained that his Chinese colleagues had decided on the name Homo longi, which he called a “brilliant name”, but said he would be just as happy to refer to species as Homo Daliensis, which was formerly used for Dali skull.
More than 100,000 years ago, several human species coexisted throughout Eurasia and Africa, including our species, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, a sister species of Neanderthals recently discovered. Dragon Man can now be added to that list.
An alternative explanation is that Homo longi and Denisovans are actually one and the same. Fossils attributed so far to Denisovans include teeth and bones, but not a complete skull, so scientists are not sure what they looked like.
But Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer to each other than to Sapiens, while new study suggests that Homo longi species were more anatomically similar to us than Neanderthals.
