Newly Discovered Human Species “Dragon Man” May Replace Neanderthals As Our Closest Relative

Comparison of Homo Skulls

This image shows comparisons among Peking Man, Maba, Jinniushan, Dali and Harbin crania (from left to right). Credit: Kai Geng

A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or “Dragon Man.” Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing today (June 25, 2021) in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives — and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.

Dragon Man Reconstruction

This image shows a reconstruction of Dragon Man in his habitat. Credit: Chuang Zhao

“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world,” says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. “This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens.”

The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City in the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could contain a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans, but it featured larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. 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,” says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.

Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. “Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish,” remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.

Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.

“We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don’t know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well,” says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.

Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. “It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens,” says Ni.

Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. “The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years,” says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.

The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. “Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations,” says Ni. “We found our long-lost sister lineage.”

References:

“Geochemical provenancing and direct dating of the Harbin archaic human cranium” by Qingfeng Shao, Junyi Ge, Qiang Ji, Jinhua Li, Wensheng Wu, Yannan Ji, Tao Zhan, Chi Zhang, Qiang Li, Rainer Grün, Chris Stringer and Xijun Ni, 25 June 2021, The Innovation.
DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100131

“Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species” by Qiang Ji, Wensheng Wu, Yannan Ji, Qiang Li and Xijun Ni, 25 June 2021, The Innovation.
DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100132

“Massive cranium from Harbin in northeastern China establishes a new Middle Pleistocene human lineage” by Xijun Ni, Qiang Ji, Wensheng Wu, Qingfeng Shao, Yannan Ji, Chi Zhang, Lei Liang, Junyi Ge, Zhen Guo, Jinhua Li, Qiang Li, Rainer Grün and Chris Stringer, 25 June 2021, The Innovation.
DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100130

6 Comments on "Newly Discovered Human Species “Dragon Man” May Replace Neanderthals As Our Closest Relative"

  1. Considering the vast differences in features of modern humans, why do scientists declare they found a new species when they find one skull that is only slighty different from others they have?

    There is an incredible amount of variation in modern humans, not only in size, but in skeletal features. Contrast the skeleton of a dwarf with that of a basketball player or perhaps the tallest human on record. They are the same species but the features are very distinctive from one to the other.

  2. Our white hominid race which came first before the devil NWO races of minorities from the two horn serpents have no relation to the austra bigfoot to sasquatch monkey men neanderthals dressed up as human look alikes by the masonic darwinists of the manifesto Israelis and this whole racist evolution lie and above I wrote.

    Instead we know that the hetero sapiens existed first and due to burials of the dead there aren’t a known public lineage tree except one thing, we whites who came first from the white ape before the minority racists have a long ancestry in DNA ancestors from the top of a chromosome to the bottom.

    So dressing up chimp relatives as a human is a racist attempt to erase our white people and the true human tree from existence.

    Havea nice paleontological unproven day.

  3. You can’t really be that dumb

  4. … another dot in a graph or tree…

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