Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

Interesting Engineering reports “A new species of hominin or humans has been discovered in Northern China with an unforgettable physical feature— large heads.

Everyone knows the Neanderthals, homo sapiens, and Denisovans are amongst the first human species. The sapiens are considered the modern humans in that grouping that migrated out of Africa. However, according to research out of China, the number of prehistoric human species might be growing.

“The morphological diversity among late Quaternary hominin fossils from eastern Asia is greater than we expected,” the authors of a new study stated.

Furthermore, “a number of new eastern Asian hominin taxa” have appeared on researcher’s radar over the past several decades.

Among them, making headlines, is a new species that has been given an apt name – Homo juluensis – for their strikingly large heads. Ju Lu means “huge head” in Chinese, as the South China Morning Post reports.

The ancient human with an impressive head size is shaking up this area of science that lies at the foundation of us, humans. Study authors propose that the Denisovans are actually Homo juluensis and that this research contributes to the “decolonization” of the field so that Asia can assume its rightful place.

A new species of hominid in China: Homo juluensis

In the late 1970s, fossils belonging to 16 individuals were found in two different locations in China. They appeared to belong to a unique species. Thousands of artifacts, stone tools, and animal bones were also uncovered. Strikingly, as lead researchers explained, they seemed to have stumbled upon a horse kill site.

Homo juluensis seemed to have hunted wild horses as a group which they would use entirely, consuming the meat, marrow, and cartilage, and making clothes with the hides with stone tools to survive the brutal winters.

With such an evocative snapshot of the inner workings of this proposed new human species, it sparks many questions, as to what happened to them.

Researchers believe that they lived in small groups, which might have made them susceptible to snowstorms, but they seemed to disappear about 120,000 years ago as modern humans began to migrate across the world.

A new era for the earliest humans?

But first, study authors strike a clear line between this new species of hominin with others but draw a controversial similarity to the Denisovans. Their teeth are alike, leading them to suggest that the Denisovans aren’t related to the Neanderthals but are, in fact, Homo juluensis.

Chinese researchers argued to South China Morning Post that Denisovan refers to a general population rather than a specific species. But Westerners want Chinese fossils to take on this name, Denisovan , but they are proposing the opposite if a new species has been identified, which they claim has been done.

It’s time to reorganize our understanding of the first humans, according to research heads Christopher Bae and Wu Xiujie. As they told SCMP , “ multiple hominin lineages” are turning up in research dating back between 300,000-50,000 years ago. So we might have more than one human species to add to the prehistoric list.

“The eastern Asian record is prompting us to recognize just how complex human evolution is more generally and really forcing us to revise and rethink our interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record.”

Source: Interesting Engineering