Modern humanity's close ancestor "Dragon Man" found

A fuller understanding of man's evolution is being attempted, and new fossils are helping.

Modern humanity's close ancestor "Dragon Man" found

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• Dragon man: A skull preserved well for more than 1,40,000 years in northeastern China represents a new species of ancient people more closely related to us than even Neanderthals. This can fundamentally alter our understanding of human evolution. It belonged to a large-brained male in his 50s with deep set eyes and thick brow ridges. Though his face was wide, it had flat, low cheekbones that made him resemble modern people more closely than other extinct members of the human family tree.
• Nomenclature: The research team linked the specimen to other Chinese fossil findings and is calling the species Homo longi or "Dragon Man," a reference to the region where it was discovered. The Harbin cranium was first found in 1933 in the city of the same name but was reportedly hidden in a well for 85 years to protect it from the Japanese army. It was later dug up and handed to Ji Qiang, a professor at Hebei GEO University, in 2018. The skull dates back at least 1,46,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene.

1. Scientists said that the Harbin group was more closely linked to H. sapiens than the Neanderthals were. The Harbin shared a more recent common ancestor with homo sapiens than the Neanderthals did.
2. So Dragon Man was a "sister species" and a closer ancestor of modern man than the Neanderthals.

• Technical information: It shows typical archaic human features, but the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously named Homo species. The name is derived from Long Jiang, which literally means "Dragon River." The Dragon Man probably lived in a forested floodplain environment as part of a small community. 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.

1. Given the location where the skull was found as well as the large-sized man it implies, the team believe H. longi may have been well adapted for harsh environments and would have been able to disperse throughout Asia.
2. Researchers studied the cranium, identifying over 600 traits they fed into a computer model that ran millions of simulations to determine the evolutionary history and relationships between different species. These suggested that Harbin and some other fossils from China form a third lineage of later humans alongside the Neanderthals and H. sapiens.

• Many human species: More than 1,00,000 years ago, several human species coexisted across Eurasia and Africa, including homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans, a recently discovered sister species to Neanderthals. "Dragon man" might now be added to that list. An alternative explanation is that H. longi and Denisovans are in fact one and the same. Fossils so far attributed to Denisovans include teeth and bones but not a full skull, so scientists are unsure what they looked like. But Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer to each other than to Sapiens, while the new study suggests H. longi were more anatomically similar to us than Neanderthals.

 

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