JAKARTA - A skull found almost perfectly preserved for more than 140,000 years in northeast China is believed to represent a new species of early humans. It has an even closer relationship with modern humans than Neanderthals.
Experts even believe this finding could fundamentally change our understanding of human evolution. This was announced by a number of scientists, Friday, July 2nd.
The skull found belonged to a large-brained man in his 50s. This skull has sunken eyes and thick eyebrows. Despite his broad face, he had flat, low cheekbones that made him look more like a modern person than other extinct members of the human lineage.
The research team has linked the specimen to other Chinese fossil finds. They called the species Homo longi or "Dragon Man", a reference to the region where it was found.
The Harbin skull was first discovered in 1933 in the city of the same name but was reported and hidden in a well for 85 years to protect it from Japanese soldiers.
It was later excavated and handed over to Ji Qiang, a professor at Hebei GEO University, in 2018.
"In our analysis, the Harbin group was more closely related to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals - that is, Harbins shared a more recent ancestor with us than Neanderthals," Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London told AFP.
This fact could make Dragon Man our "sister species" and a closer ancestor of modern humans than the Neanderthal species.
The findings were published in three papers in the journal The Innovation. The skull dates back at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene century.
"Despite showing the hallmarks of early humans, the Harbin skull presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters that distinguishes itself from all other previously named Homo species," said Ji, who led the study.
Dragon Man probably lived in a forested floodplain environment as part of a small community.
"This population will become hunter-gatherers, and live off the land," Stringer said. "From today's winter temperatures in Harbin, it looks like they faced a harsher cold than Neanderthals."
Given the location where the skull was found and the large human size it implies, the team believes that Homo longi may have adapted well to survive the harsh environment and would have been able to spread throughout Asia.
The researchers first studied the skull, identifying more than 600 traits that they fed into a computer model that ran millions of simulations to determine the evolutionary history and relationships between different species.
"This suggests that Harbin and several other fossils from China formed the third lineage of later humans alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens," Stringer said.
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