The theory of evolution, an extraordinary process which explains, or tries to explain, how we, the modern day humans, evolved.
Today, the planet is home to just one species of hominin — Homo sapiens.
It's easy to think of Homo sapiens as unique, but there was a time when we weren't the only humans on the block. Human evolution has never been linear. It's like a complex web, a web which is constantly getting upgraded and is never static even today, roughly 7 million years after the first of our ancestors set foot.
In the millennia since Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, we have shared the planet with mainly the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. But there also existed the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and Homo naledi, as well as several other ancient hominins, roughly 20 other species.
To put it simply, We had sex with some of them and produced babies to be what we are today. Some of our ancestors are well represented in the fossil record. The Neanderthals are said to be most closely related to us, and most of what we know about Denisovans comes from genetic information in our DNA.
But a few days back, in northeastern China, a massive head was re-discovered.
Almost 90 years ago, Japanese soldiers occupying northern China forced a Chinese man to help build a bridge across the Songhua River in Harbin. While his supervisors weren’t looking, he found a treasure: a remarkably complete human skull buried in the riverbank. He wrapped up the heavy cranium and hid it in a well to prevent his Japanese supervisors from finding it. Today, the skull is finally coming out of hiding, and it has a new name: Dragon Man, the newest member of the human family, who lived more than 146,000 years ago.
The skull preserved almost perfectly represents a new species of ancient people more closely related to us than even Neanderthals - and could fundamentally alter our understanding of human evolution. Researchers have gone to call it "Dragon Man.", Or Homo Longi, put scientifically.
It could hold a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans but with larger eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth and oversized teeth.
The team believe the cranium belonged to a male, around 50 years old, living in a forested floodplain.
The skull had remained hidden in an abandoned well for 85 years, after a laborer came across it at a construction site in China.
For one, it brings new knowledge about the evolution of Homo sapiens — which is to say that if the “Dragon Man” is indeed a new species, it might help to bridge the gaps between our ancient ancestors called Homo erectus and us.
They say that Homo longi or the Dragon Man, and not the Neanderthals, was the extinct human species mostly closely related to our own. If confirmed, that would change how scientists envision the origin of Homo sapiens, which has been built up over the years from fossil discoveries and the analysis of ancient DNA.
There is an interesting opposition to the argument which suspects that the large skull has an equally exciting identity: They think it may be the long-sought skull of a Denisovan, an elusive human ancestor from Asia known chiefly from DNA and very little fossil. To date, the only clearly identified Denisovan fossils are a pinkie bone, teeth, and a bit of skull bone from Denisova Cave. But the enormous, “weird” molar from the new find fits with the molars from Denisova.
“We are human beings. It is always a fascinating question about where we were from and how we evolved,” said coauthor Xijun Ni, a research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “We found our long-lost sister lineage"