Scientists have said a more than 140,000-year-old skull found in northeastern China belongs to new ancient species of humans called Homo longi and have nicknamed it “Dragon Man”. They estimate that the skull belonged to a man, who was about 50 years old when he died, between 146,000 and 296,000 years ago.
The backstory
The skull remained wrapped up and hidden in an abandoned well for 85 years. In 1933, a labourer working at a bridge construction site in the city of Harbin in China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang came across the peculiar skull, according to one of the studies in The Innovation. It’s likely that the man, whose name has been withheld by his family, recognised that he had found a scientifically important specimen. Researchers had found another humanlike skull, nicknamed Peking Man, near Beijing just four years ago.
The labourer chose to hide it rather than hand it over to the Japanese authorities who occupied northeast China at the time and he did not mention the skull to anyone for decades. The authors of the new papers, in an account of the fossil’s discovery, speculated that he was ashamed of having worked for the Japanese, according to the New York Times. “Instead of passing the cranium to his Japanese boss, he buried it in an abandoned well, a traditional Chinese method of concealing treasures,” according to the study.
Also read | Explained: Where does ‘Dragon Man’ fit in human evolution
The labourer told his family about the fossil before he died in 2018, who then located the well. The family then dug it up and donated it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University.
Huge brain, missing chin
The findings were published in three papers in the journal The Innovation. The researchers have named the new species Homo longi and gave it the nickname “Dragon Man,” after the Long Jiang, which means “Dragon River”, region of northeast China where the skull was discovered.
According to the researchers, the Harbin skull, which is 23cm long and more than 15cm wide, belonged to a male in his 50s with a huge brain, deep-set eyes, thick brow ridges and a bulbous nose. Though his face was wide, it had flat, low cheekbones and his mouth was broad and the lower jaw is missing. But the researchers inferred from the Dragon Man’s upper jaw and other fossil human skulls that he likely lacked a chin. They also said say that his brain was about 7 per cent larger than the average brain of a living human. All his facial features made him resemble modern people more closely than other extinct members of the human family tree.
Also read | 2 finds in Israel, China shed new light on our origin
“While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously named Homo species,” Ji Qiang, a professor at Hebei GEO University who led the research, was quoted as saying by AFP.
Habitat
“Dragon Man” probably lived in a forested floodplain area as part of a small community. Researchers believe H longi may have been well adapted for harsh environments and would have been able to disperse throughout Asia based on the location where the skull was found as well as the large-sized man it points to.
“This population would have been hunter-gatherers, living off the land. From the winter temperatures in Harbin today, it looks like they were coping with even harsher cold than the Neanderthals,” co-author Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London told AFP. “From the winter temperatures in Harbin today, it looks like they were coping with even harsher cold than the Neanderthals,” Stringer added.
The researchers have said that Homo longi, and not the Neanderthals, were the extinct human species most closely related to our own kind. But a number of experts do not agree that Dragon Man is a separate species but many think that the find could help scientists reconstruct the human family tree and find how modern humans emerged.