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A virtual reconstruction of the Harbin skull that scientists have named “Dragon Man”. Photo: EurekaAlert! via AFP

Is China’s ‘Dragon Man’ from a new branch of the human family tree?

  • Scientists say a skull found by a farmer in the 1930s could point to a new species or belong to the Denisovan line thought to have lived throughout Asia
  • The fossil is a new piece in the jigsaw puzzle of human evolution and much more work needs to be done, researchers say
Science
An almost complete skull found in northeastern China promises to shed light on human evolution for many years to come even as researchers debate whether the find represents an entirely new species, according to scientists involved in the study.

In a series of scientific papers, a group of scientists from China and Britain said the skull – found by a farmer in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, in the 1930s and buried in a well for the next 85 years – did not belong to any existing branch of the human family tree.

The scientists named the new species Homo longi, or “Dragon Man”, and said the species may well replace Neanderthals as the closest relative of modern humans.

The skull was probably male, was at least 146,000 years old, and represented “a new sister lineage for Homo sapiens”, the researchers said in the three papers published in the journal The Innovation on Thursday.

But some scientists argued that instead of belonging to a new species, the skull could be a Denisovan, a line of ancient humans who are thought to have lived throughout Asia.

Even if the skull is Denisovan, the find would be just as stunning, scientists said, because so little remains of this group.

Ji Qiang, a professor of palaeontology at Hebei GEO University and one of the co-authors of the paper, said he first heard about the skull from a farmer in 2018.

The skull belonged to the farmer’s grandfather who found it during the Japanese occupation under a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin in 1933. However, the grandfather died before his family could ask him the precise location of where it was found, according to the papers.

Ji persuaded the family to donate the specimen to the university’s geoscience museum and began researching the find together with university colleague Ni Xijun and Chris Stringer, from London’s Natural History Museum.

The team said they managed to locate the site after a range of experiments and tests, saying it was from a layer of sediment dating back to between 138,000 and 309,000 years.

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Stringer said the skull could be Denisovan, the team did not agree with all the views expressed in the papers and much more work needed to be done.

“For example, I think that genetic calibrations are still important in establishing branching times in human evolution, and while I agree that the Harbin group warrants a distinct species name, I would prefer to place the Harbin and Dali fossils together as Homo daliensis,” he said, referring to an ancient skull found in Shaanxi province.

“These differences of opinion should not deflect from a remarkable new piece in the jigsaw of human evolution, a fossil that will continue to add important information for many years to come.”

Ni agreed, telling Chinese science website Guokr on Saturday that the papers were preliminary studies and further investigation into the DNA and anatomical structure of the skull would follow.

He said there was not enough evidence yet to conclude that the fossil was a Denisovan.

“What the two have in common now is large teeth, but large teeth is also a primitive trait among other ancient humans, for example, the Homo habilis who lived in African about 2 million years ago,” Ni was quoted as saying.

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Wang Shejiang, a researcher from the Institute of Vertebrate palaeontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Science, said the lack of information about the precise location of where the fossil was found increased the uncertainties of the findings.

Wang, who was not involved in the study, said the large range of time in the sediment layer linked to the skull could lead to different conclusions.

“There were great climatic fluctuations during 300,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, and 146,000 years ago. The time a fossil is linked to leads to different interpretations about how humans adapted to the climate, and how they survived and migrated,” he said.

Stringer said the find remained extremely significant regardless of the debate.

“This beautifully preserved fossil is a remarkable new piece in the jigsaw of human evolution, and will continue to add important information for many years to come. I consider it one of the most significant finds of the last 50 years – although it was, of course, first discovered in 1933.

“It establishes a third human lineage in East Asia with its own evolutionary history and shows how important the region was for human evolution.”

Archaeologist Peter Cobb, from the University of Hong Kong, said debate was common when the data set available for analysis was limited to few samples, but the new evidence from this research could help expand knowledge of humanity’s evolutionary past.

“This discovery should also encourage increased support for scientific exploration to carefully locate and record additional samples of comparative data in their original contexts,” Cobb said.

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Mark Maslin, a professor of earth system science at the University College London, said the Harbin skull added to evidence that human evolution was not a simple evolutionary tree but a dense intertwined bush.

“Genetic analysis shows that these species interacted and interbred – our own genetics contain the legacy of many of these ghost species,” he said.

“But what is a sobering thought, is that despite all this diversity, a new version of Homo sapiens emerged from Africa about 60,000 years ago which clearly out-competed, outbred, and even outfought these other closely related species, causing their extinction,” he said.

“It is only by painstaking searching and analysis of their fossils, such as the Harbin skull, do we know of their existence.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Meet ‘Dragon Man’, the find that may reshape evolution
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