A mysterious ancient human-like skull found in China may have been the love child of two species, researchers say.
They believe the 900,000-year-old individual was a hybrid – part us, Homo sapien, part Homo longi, a long-lost species known as the “Dragon Man.”
The skull, named “Yunxian Man” after Yunyang County in Hubei Province in 2022, baffled archaeologists because of its strange shape and features.
The new study created a complete 3D model of the skull and showed that it had the facial bones of a human but a flattened skull, boxy eyes and a thicker forehead bone of Homo longi.
Based on the preliminary findings, it concluded that the person was called “the Yunxian man,” after our “long-lost sister line.”
“Yunxian can be considered to be morphologically and chronologically close to the last common ancestor of the H. sapiens and Dragon Man lineages,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published as a preprint on the research site BioRxiv.
The skull was one of three skulls found in China in the last 50 years that initially puzzled scientists and could not identify their origin.
Figuring out which bone matches which species may seem like simple science, but scientists still don’t agree on how many human-like species there were in our recent archeological history, Anna Goldfield, an archaeologist at Boston University, wrote for Sapiens.org.
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It is generally accepted that there were two archaic human species – Neanderthals and Denisovans – who lived on Earth as separate groups and had distinct characteristics until about 30,000 years ago.
But the A Yunxian man’s skull was difficult to classify into a single category.
Based on its physical properties and location, researchers had assumed it could be a member of the Denisovan family, which originated in Asia about 500,000 years ago.
Although the Yunxian had an elongated skull, similar to the Denisovan, it was also characterized by the distinctive, box-shaped eyes.
However, researchers have speculated that the “Dragon Man” lineage may include Denisovans, since the groups lived on Earth around the same time.
After analyzing the new skull, researchers found that its features were similar to those of early humans and dragon people, meaning it was likely a descendant of both.
Homo longi had large, blocky eye sockets, molars much larger than ours, a thick frontal bone and a similar brain size to humans, Professor Goldfield said.
And these features were observed in the Skull of a Yunxian man.
“The reconstructed Yunxian 2 suggests that it is an early member of the Asian ‘Dragon Man’ lineage, which probably also includes the Denisovans, and that it is the sister group of the Homo sapiens lineage,” wrote the authors.
“Both the Homo sapiens and Dragon Man lineages had deep roots that extended beyond the Middle Pleistocene, and the basal position of the fossil skull from Yunxian suggests that they represent a population close to the last common ancestor of the two lineages.”
This paper has yet to be peer-reviewed by other scientists, but previous research on dragonmen by lead author, paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni, has been published in journals such as The Innovation.
Modern humans became their own species, Homo sapiens, about a million years ago. They started in Africa but soon spread around the world.
Neanderthals emerged about 400,000 years ago in Europe and Asia.
Their skulls were long, they had a thick ridge over their eyes, and they had a broader, larger nose than most modern Homo sapiens.
They also had weaker, less defined chins, according to NHM.
Denisovans also come from Asia, as their only fossils were found in Siberia and China. However, researchers believe they likely roamed the entire Asian continent, according to The Australian Museum.
Relatively little is known about this class of humans, as researchers have so far only found 11 partial fossils of Denisovans.
Despite this limited selection, scientists found that the jaws of Denisovans were much more pronounced than those of Neanderthals. Their teeth were much larger and their pelvises much wider than modern humans, but their fingers were similar to ours.
Although each of these species is unique, they were genetically similar enough to allow them to mate – just as horses and donkeys can mate to form a mule.
Dude, that’s what they did. According to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, there are some people today who have one to four percent Neanderthal DNA and four to six percent Denisovan DNA.