DISCOVERIES
All the biggest science news. This month: humans get a new closest relative and real gold found in fool’s gold
Anewly identified species of ancient hominin may be the closest relative to modern humans ever discovered, a team of international researchers has claimed.
Named Homo longi, or ‘Dragon Man’, the new species was identified from a near-perfectly preserved fossil known as the Harbin cranium, which was unearthed in Harbin City in northeastern China in the 1930s. The name comes from the province where Harbin City is found: Heilongjiang, which translates as ‘Dragon River’.
H. longi’s large skull could house a brain similar in size to that of modern humans, but had larger eye sockets,
heavy, prominent brow ridges and a wide gaping mouth containing large, well-developed teeth.
“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world,” said Qiang Ji, a professor of palaeontology of Hebei GEO University, where the fossil is stored.
“This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens. While it shows typical archaic
human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characteristics, setting itself apart from all the other previously named Homo species.”
The researchers believe that the cranium belonged to a male who was around 50 years old at the time of his death. They think H. longi would have lived in small communities in forests. The cranium suggests that the Harbin individual was very large, so it’s likely H. longi was well adapted for survival in harsh environments and may have been successful enough to disperse all over Asia, they say.
The team estimates the Harbin fossil to be at least 146,000 years old, dating it back to the Middle Pleistocene. It’s likely to have been around at the same time as Denisovans, Neanderthals and H. sapiens, and may even have interacted with ancient humans. After hours of work piecing together how H. longi fits into the hominin family tree, the team discovered that it was one of the closest relatives to modern humans. "I've long suspected that there was a distinct species of human in East Asia and I was delighted to be invited to study this wonderful fossil that validated the idea. I was surprised by the resulting phylogeny linking it to H. sapiens rather than H. neanderthalensis, but our conclusions are based on the analysis of large amounts of data,” said Prof Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London.
“The analyses employed over 600 traits, equally weighted, and millions of tree-building processes to arrive at the most parsimonious trees. It establishes a third human lineage in East Asia with its own evolutionary history and shows how important the region was for human evolution.”
Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.
“It’s widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our species. But our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes H. longi is the sister group of H. sapiens,” said Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and palaeoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“The team estimates the Harbin fossil to be at least 146,000 years old, dating it back to the Middle Pleistocene"