THE face of humans’ most mysterious ancestor has finally been uncovered after 217,000 years.
The discovery proves that the ‘Dragon Man’ of China is indeed a Denisovan, a long lost ancestral species.
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It is the first time a near-complete skull has been definitively linked to the extinct people.
The fossil, which is at least 146,000 years old, reveals Denisovans had a prominent brow ridge and a brain as large as modern humans and Neanderthals.
They even had more modern features, like delicate cheekbones.
Their relatively flat lower face doesn’t jut out like it does in other primates and more ancient hominins.
The massive size of the skull also suggests a very large body, which could have helped it survive brutal winters in northeastern China.
“Having a well-preserved skull like this one allows us to compare the Denisovans to many more different specimens found in very different places,” paleoanthropologist Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the new study, told National Geographic.
“This means we might be able to compare their body proportions and start thinking about their adaptations to climate, for example.”
Scientists have long speculated about the appearance of the mysterious Denisovans.
Other bones relating to the ancient ancestor have been discovered over the decades, such as a robust jawbone found off the coast of Taiwan in the 2000s which was recently attributed to the Denisovans.
But none more intact than the ‘Dragon Man’ or ‘Harbin skull’.
A finger bone found in Denisova Cave, Siberia, in 2010 was the first example of the elusive Denisovans – and where they got their unofficial name.
“It’s really exciting to finally have Denisovan DNA from a nearly complete cranium,” Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Nature.
“We finally have some insights into the cranial morphology of the Denisovans.”
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In 2021, a team of Chinese researchers made the controversial claim that a bizarre skull they had found could belong to a previously unknown species.
They dubbed this unknown species Homo longi, nicknamed ‘Dragon Man’, inspired by the Long Jiang Dragon River region where the skull was found.
The fossil is believed to have been hidden by a Chinese labourer for 85 years, before the man’s grandson handed the specimen to Qiang Ji, a palaeontologist at Hebei GEO University in Shijiazhuang in 2018.
Ji, who co-authored the original Homo longi paper, suspects the man discovered the artefact himself but failed to report it to authorities.
The grandson claimed the fossil was unearthed the fossil in 1933 during bridge-construction work over the Long Jiang river.
The construction worker then supposedly buried it in an abandoned well, where it remained until a deathbed confession.
When Ji published his findings in 2021, Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing – who worked on the very first Denisovan DNA from the Siberian finger bone – wanted to see if they shared any ancient molecules.
Ji and Fu’s team first attempted to extract ancient DNA from a part of the skull called the petrous bone in the inner ear – where DNA might survive after 146,000 years – and from an attached tooth.
They didn’t recover any genetic material.
But what they did find was sequence fragments from 95 ancient proteins from the petrous samples.
One protein sequence from the Dragon Man fossil was identical to that of a protein from the Siberian finger bone, as well as Denisovan bones from Tibet and Taiwan, the experts reveal in two papers published in the journals Science and Cell this week.
This protein sequence differed from modern humans and Neanderthals – suggesting the man was likely a Denisovan.
“After 15 years, we give the Denisovan a face,” said Fu. “It’s really a special feeling, I feel really happy.”
It is understood the new species will adopt the Homo longi name, like we humans are Homo sapiens.
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