The Exciting Case of China’s ‘Dragon Man’

By Jim Brace-Thompson

The story reads like an exciting detective yarn complete with wartime drama, a deathbed confession, and a name just made for newspaper headlines.

A wonderfully complete skull was unearthed in a riverbank and hidden from view in China during forced labor to build a bridge over the Songhua River under Japanese occupation leading up to World War II. The young Chinese laborer who made the find had wrapped and lowered it into a well to hide it from occupying forces. As he lay dying, nearly 90 years later, he finally told his story to his grandchildren, who prefer to remain anonymous.

Now the skull has been unearthed once again in a series of papers in the journal The Innovation, where paleontologist Qiang Ji and colleagues have named it Homo longi. Translation? “Dragon Man”!

Per their analysis, this fossil human is a step closer to modern Homo sapiens than the Ice Age Neanderthals, who have long been considered our closest relative on the human family tree.

While the Chinese team has given the skull a whole new taxonomic designation, other scientists suspect that Dragon Man may represent the first nearly complete skull of a group of ancient hominins known as the Denisovans, or “an extinct cousin of the Neanderthals.” Up to now, Denisovans chiefly have been known from bits and pieces of bone, teeth, and DNA, as well as the stone tools they left behind in various sites across Asia and Siberia. In the journal Science, some are saying this skull “may reveal the long-sought face of a Denisovan” from between 183,000 and 309,000 years ago.

Is it so? Stay tuned! This detective yarn is just beginning.