“Dragon man”: 140,000 year old skull leads to the discovery of a new human species
A huge fossil skull found (Dragon Man) in China could be our closest relative in the human family tree than previously known Neanderthals.
The Harbin cranium (The fossil,), is the biggest of the known homo skulls, and scientists now say this skull represents a newly found human species called Homo longi, or “dragon man”.
Their findings, which appear in three articles published in the journal Innovation. According to articles, the Homo longi line could be our closest relative and that it has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.
According to the author Qiang Ji, “The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human skull fossils in the world,”.
Qiang Ji is professor in the paleontology department at GEO Hebei University in China.
“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human skull fossils in the world,” said author Qiang Ji, professor of paleontology at GEO Hebei University in China.
The skull was reportedly found in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China in the 1930s. The huge skull contained a brain comparable in size to modern humans, but it had-
- Larger, almost square eye sockets,
- Thick eyebrows,
- A wide mouth, and
- Oversized teeth.
“Although the Harbin skull has typical archaic human features, it has a mosaic-like combination of primitive and derived features that stand out from all other previously mentioned homo species,” said Qiang Ji, leading to his message Homo longi species designation.
In addition, the team also discovered that Homo longi is one of our closest hominid relatives, even closer to us than Neanderthals.
“Neanderthals are generally thought of as an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified belongs to Homo longi, which is the sister group of H sapiens,” said H sapiens Ni.
Qiang Ni also said that “The time of the divergence between H-Sapiens and Neanderthals could be even deeper in evolutionary history than is generally believed, over a million years ago,”. If so, we probably broke up with Neanderthals about 400,000 years earlier than scientists thought.
According to the Researchers, finding and results from Harbin’s skull have the potential to rewrite key elements of human evolution. Their analysis of the life story of Homo longi recommends that they were strong and robust people whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens could in turn shape our history.
Why this discovery (Dragon Man) is considered important?
On the one hand, this gives the new information about the evolution of Homo sapiens, which means that if “Dragon Man” is really a new species, then definitely it helps to fill the gap between us and our ancient ancestors known as Homo erectus.
This information is significant because there is very slight consensus in the scientific community that which species are immediate ancestor and how different species are related.
For example, the Smithsonian notes that few paleontologists trust that Homo heidelbergensis (discovered in 1908) are our immediate ancestors. Heidelbergensis lived in Europe and possibly China and parts of Africa about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago.
There are also other unanswered questions, as if there were crossbreeds between different human species. For example, it is believed that Neanderthals contributed almost 1-4% of the DNA of modern non-African people.
According to the Natural History Museum, interbreeding with ancient humans enabled Homo sapiens to acquire genes which enhanced their survival chances; even some of those genes are still present in modern humans today. For example, some DNA inherited from Neanderthals is supposed to be involved in boosting immunity.
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