“Dragon Man” skull found in China could be a new human species Science and Technology News

The skull, which has been preserved in northeast China for nearly 140,000 years, represents new species found closer to ancient Neanderthals and could fundamentally change understanding of human evolution, scientists said on Friday.

He belonged to a high-brained man in the 50s, with deep eyes and thick foreheads. Although his face was broad, his cheeks were flat and low, making him look more like modern people than the other extinct members of the human tree.

The research team linked the sample to other fossil finds in China and named the species Homo longi or “Dragon Man” as a reference to the region they found.

The Harbin skull was first discovered in 1933 in the city of the same name, but was said to have been hidden in a well for 85 years to protect it from the Japanese army.

It was later drilled and handed over to Ji Qiang Hebei, a professor at GEO University in 2018.

“In our analysis, the Harbin group is more closely related to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals – that is, Harbin shared a new common ancestor with us than Neanderthals,” wrote Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London. he told AFP.

‘Sister species’

This, he said, would make the Dragon Man our “sister species” and a closer ancestor of modern man than the Neanderthal one.

The findings were published in three articles in The Innovation magazine. The skull is at least 146,000 years old and was located in the Middle Pleistocene.

“Although it exhibits typical archaic features of man, the Harbin skull presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derivative characters that distinguishes it from all other previously named Homo species,” said Ji, who led the study.

The name comes from Long Jiang, which literally means “Dragon River”.

The Dragon Man probably lived in a small flooded forest environment within a small community.

“This population would be hunter-gatherers, living off the land,” Stringer said. “Given the winter temperatures in Harbin today, it looks like they were getting even colder than the Neanderthals.”

Seeing the place where the skull was found and the large size that this entails, the group believed that Homo longi could be well adapted to harsh environments and be able to spread throughout Asia.

Future genetic sequencing

The researchers first examined the skull, identifying more than 600 features fed into a computer model that performed millions of simulations, to determine evolutionary history and relationships between different species.

“This suggests that Harbin and several other Chinese fossils form the third lineage of later humans alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” Stringer explained.

Other finds include a fossilized skull from China’s Dalí province, believed to be 200,000 years old and discovered in 1978, and a jawbone found in Tibet 160,000 years ago.

Stringer explained that his Chinese colleagues decided to name it Homo longi, calling it a “great name,” but said he would be happy to name the species Homo Daliensis, which was previously used for the Dalí skull.

More than 100,000 years ago, several human species coexisted throughout Eurasia and Africa, including ours, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, sister species of Neanderthals recently discovered. “Dragon man” could be added to that list.

An alternative explanation is that Homo longi and Denisovans are in fact one and the same. Fossils attributed to the Denisovars so far include teeth and bones, but not the entire skull, so scientists don’t know what it was like.

But Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer to each other than Sapiens, while new research suggests that Homo longi were more anatomically similar to us than Neanderthals.

Therefore, ongoing uncertainty may require future genetic sequencing to help elucidate.

The researchers first studied the skull to determine the history of evolution and the relationships between different species [Chuang Zhao/EurekAlert/ AFP]