Arya Sukumar, College of Agriculture, Vellayani
Feeling utterly happy to share the news that we have discovered our long-lost sister lineage. Experts think that this skull represents a newly discovered human species called Homo longi, or “Dragon Man,” as it is the largest of all known Homo skulls.
Unveiling the story of the Homo longi skull:
‘The cranium was discovered in 1933 by a Chinese laborer during World War II. When the worker discovered the cranium, Japanese forces were monitoring the construction of a bridge over the Songhua River, which is part of the Lóng Jing, or Dragon River, near Harbin City in northern China. He stowed it away in an abandoned well, where it stayed for over a century.
He only revealed the secret to his family soon before his death in 2018, who retrieved the fossil and donated it to the museum for research’ Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University explains. According to him, the skull belonged to a 50-year-old male individual who lived in forested, floodplain settings as part of a small community. They hunted animals and birds, collected fruits and vegetables, and may have caught fish, just like Homo sapiens.
Significance of the study:
The Harbin skull residing at the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University is featured bigger, almost square eye sockets, strong brow ridges, a broad mouth, and gigantic teeth, and could house a brain similar in size to modern humans. The Harbin specimen is one of the most complete human cranium fossils ever discovered. The skull was dated to at least 146,000 years ago by Qiang Ji, Xijun Ni, and their colleagues, who used a series of geochemical analyses to date it to the Middle Pleistocene, a time when human species were migrating in large numbers and it is believed that H. longi and H. sapiens may have met during this period.
There might have been more encounters since we don’t know when the Harbin group vanished. The Neanderthal man was thought to be the closest relative of Homo sapiens. But H. longi is discovered as the actual sister group of H. sapiens, even more closely linked to ourselves, according to the new lineage. H. sapiens and Neanderthals may have diverged for a longer time than previously assumed, maybe reaching one million years. If true, humans diverged from Neanderthals 400,000 years sooner than experts previously assumed.
Conclusion:
Dragon man might be our sister lineage and has the potential to reshape our outlook on human evolution. The skull of H. longi was unearthed from Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China, in the 1930s. Many morphological features were retained in this fossil, which is important for understanding the development of the Homo genus and the genesis of Homo sapiens. The findings from the Harbin skull, according to the researchers, have the potential to rewrite fundamental aspects of human evolution. Their research into the life history of Dragon man shows that they were powerful, robust people whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have impacted our history. Altogether, the Harbin cranium adds to our knowledge of diversity and evolutionary connections among the Homo species and populations.
Also read: Structure of the deepest point in Earth’s hydrosphere revealed!
References:
- Ji Q., Wu W., Ji Y., Li Q., Ni X. (2021). Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species. The Innovation. https://www.cell.com/the-innovation/fulltext/S2666-6758(21)00057-6#relatedArticles
- Ni, X., Ji, Q., Wu, W., Shao, Q., Ji, Y., Zhang, C., … & Stringer, C. (2021). Massive cranium from Harbin in northeastern China establishes a new Middle Pleistocene human lineage. The Innovation. https://www.cell.com/the-innovation/fulltext/S2666-6758(21)00055-2
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