FAMILIAL TIES

A few recently discovered early human fossils further complicate our evolutionary timeline

- AKSHIT SANGOMLA

SOME 146,000 years ago, just as Homo sapiens, the modern human, was roaming across Africa, Europe, and Asia, a similar-looking individual walked through forested floodplains of northeastern China. This could be the closest relative of the modern human found so far, say scientists who studied the well-preserved fossilized skull of the 50-year-old individual. The skull is named the Harbin cranium after the city where it was found, while the individual has been tentatively named Homo long or “Dragon Man” after the Long Jiang river in the region. While there is no consensus about the individual’s identity and its relation to the modern human, its arrival adds another layer to evolutionary history and throws up challenges to our understanding of how the modern human came to be.

The Harbin cranium was first found in 1933 by a construction worker, but he did not disclose its discovery. It is in 2018 after his death that his family donated the skull to the Hebei geo University. Since then, scientists led by Qiang Ji from the university, along with Xijuan Ni from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum, UK, have revealed astonishing details about the Dragon Man. The results were published in three separate research papers in the journal The Innovation on June 25, 2021.