In Search of Dragon Man

The Harbin fossil cranium is an exceptionally well preserved archaic human skull that was reportedly discovered in 1933 during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The skull was found by Chinese labourers who were building a bridge over the Songhua River in the city of Harbin, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. The skull was concealed from the Japanese in an abandoned well and only came to light in 2018 after the worker responsible told his grandson about it shortly before his death.

The skull is thought to have belonged to a male aged about fifty. It is massive in size, larger than those of all other known archaic humans. The braincase is relatively long and low, unlike the globular braincase of a modern human. The browridges are massive, like those of a Neanderthal. Only one tooth is still present, a left molar. The cranial capacity is 1,420 cc, comparable to that of a modern human or a Neanderthal, and much larger than that of earlier humans such as Homo erectus, Homo naledi, or Homo antecessor. Overall, however, the Harbin skull is distinct from other Middle or Late Pleistocene human species, such as Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, or Homo heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis.

The age of the skull has been widely reported as 146,000 years, but this is only a minimum age. The circumstance of the excavation makes dating the skull problematic, as there is no clear archaeological context. However, researchers have managed to constrain the age of the skull by optically stimulated luminescence to 138,0000 – 309,000 years old, and uranium series dating gives a minimum age of 146,000 years. Accordingly, the skull could be anything from 146,000 to 309,000 years old. This date range lies within the late Middle Pleistocene period. The cold climate of northeastern China means that there is a good chance that DNA has been preserved in good condition and could possibly be recovered from the skull, although this has not yet been attempted.

The skull has been studied by an international team led by Qiang Ji, Professor of Palaeontology at the Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang. The team includes Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who claimed that the Harbin skull is the most important fossil he had seen in 50 years. In June 2021, three papers were released in The Innovation, an open-access online journal published by Cell Press in partnership with members of the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The researchers claim that the skull represents a new human species, named Homo longi and nicknamed ‘Dragon Man’. The specific name is derived from the geographic name Long Jiang, which is a common name for the Heilongjiang Province and means ‘dragon river’. Homo longi is claimed to be a sister group to Homo sapiens and is more closely related to modern humans than are Neanderthals. This conclusion is based on a technique known as cladistic analysis. If correct, our understanding of this late period of human evolution will have to be drastically revised.