Recently in a paper, Qiang Ji and his colleagues of Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, China, claimed to have discovered a new human species in the form of a Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium. This skull has reverberated the internet with various names as ‘Dragon man’ and ‘Homo longi’. The skull of this specimen was dumped in a well in 1933 by Chinese construction workers and later it was donated to Hebei GEO University (HGU) in 2018.
Harbin man was found near the Dongjiang Bridge in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China. Uranium-series dating of this skull estimated that it lived some 1,48,000 years ago. It is an extinct Homo who had a massive body, an extremely wide upper face, with large and almost square eye orbits and a U-shaped palate. Other features of the specimen include a wide triangular nasal cavity and a large cranial capacity of 1420 cc. According to these features it has similarities with Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The cranial capacity of this specimen is larger than that of the other archaic Homo species. However, unlike Homo sapiens, the cranium of this specimen is not roundish but is elongated with a low vault. Supraorbital ridges are very prominent and lack human like parietal prominences. On the basis of a combination of apomorphic and plesiomorphic traits of Harbin skull, the authors suggest it to be a new extinct Homo species which is different from other archaic species such as, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. heidelbergensis/ rhodesiensis of the middle-late Pleistocene. Jeffrey Schwartz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, however, is of the opinion that it is very important to know how these archaic people interacted with each other in order to trace their evolution. Consequently, assigning unique species to them is difficult.
As the skull has been removed from its original position, there is no evidence of correlational materials and stone tools. To assign a new species to this skullis rather an open question at this point in time. More finds along with material culture will perhaps help throw more light on this issue.The new Homo finds makes the situation cloudy rather than clearing the picture of human evolutionary scene. With every new find, the problem of solving the human evolution becomes interesting and we are looking forward to the new fossil evidence to reach a conclusive decision on designating Homo species.
Professor S. P. Singh, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Human Biology Review
Former Dean, Faculty of Life Sciences,
Punjabi University, Patiala, India