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Science

Massive Human Head In Chinese Well Forces Scientists To Rethink Evolution (theguardian.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution. Shmoodling writes: Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals. The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or "Dragon man," by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation.

"I think this is one of the most important finds of the past 50 years," said Prof Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the project. "It's a wonderfully preserved fossil." The skull appears to have a remarkable backstory. According to the researchers, it was originally found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. To keep the skull from falling into Japanese hands it was wrapped and hidden in an abandoned well, resurfacing only in 2018 after the man who hid it told his grandson about it shortly before he died. Details are published in three papers in The Innovation.
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Massive Human Head In Chinese Well Forces Scientists To Rethink Evolution More

Massive Human Head In Chinese Well Forces Scientists To Rethink Evolution

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  • And that man (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    With the enormous head? Some say he referred to himself as SuperKendall.

  • Rewrites (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Friday June 25, 2021 @04:20PM (#61521352)

    Scientists find a single, large, humanoid skull, so they have rethink the entirety of human evolution? That's not how that works. They found an extinct branch, or a one-off genetic mutation, neither of which changes anything that exists now.

    • The journalist said that, probably not the scientists. But like *any* new discovery, there is some rethinking of existing theories. That's how science works.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by poptopdrop ( 6713596 )

      Nerd.

      This is no longer the site for you and your facts and scientific method.
      The editors are ensuring this is a site for extraordinary claims without anything to back them up.
      Trump must be proud.

      • **Seriously** doubt the editors here are T supporters, so pleased more than proud.Shows where their minds are really at.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        What they fail to do, is take into account the cyclic nature of ice ages over the last hundreds of thousands of years and how that has impacted humanity. That cyclic accessibility to land and then cut off again. The cyclic glaciers covering land over for twenty thousand odd years for it to reappear for ten thousand odd years after massive flooding, think the sea level rise was bad 120m think the floods down rivers from kilometre high melting glaciers.

        Now humanity loves river mouths and that's where human s

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          PS want to find them, you need to find the old ice age river mouths the dominant one just before the ice age, buried below ten thousand years of sedimentation and see what you can find down in that layer buried below a 120m of sea and many metres of mud. There should be more than one layer and at different locations, as there was more than one buried river mouth, every thirty odd thousands years apart over hundreds of thousands of years.

          Want to know human evolution, then you have to study ice age evolution,

      • If you don't like it, flood the editors with well-written submissions which push the site in the direction that you want it to go in.

        I average about 1 submission in 4 that I make which get onto the front page. What is your average?

        Or .. are you too lazy to try to make the site reflect what interests you?

    • http://tumblehomelearning.com/... [tumblehomelearning.com]

      9. Chinese Dragon Bones / Peking Man

    • They found an extinct branch

      You don't know that. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were long presumed to be genetic dead ends, but we now know they were not. Perhaps Mr. Longi was not either.

      or a one-off genetic mutation

      That is an unlikely conclusion to draw from one data point.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Daetrin ( 576516 )

        You don't know that. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were long presumed to be genetic dead ends, but we now know they were not. Perhaps Mr. Longi was not either.

        I am not a geneticist, but i'm pretty sure there's a difference between a species having a genetic legacy and a species not being extinct. It's pretty accepted at this point that birds descended from dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean that T-Rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, etc aren't still extinct. A legacy is something that survives after you're gone, by definition it doesn't make you not gone. We don't see any people of this particular variety of big head wandering around today, so unless you're suggesting

        • there's a difference between a species having a genetic legacy and a species not being extinct

          That would imply that, since at least half of the Neanderthal genome is found in human genomes (albeit, rarely more than 3% in any one human's genome ; smaller figures for the Denisovan genome) then Neanderthals (and Denisovans) are not extinct, and are us.

          That's OK ; I'm cool with that. Working in geology, I am very clear that what we get from the ones (teeth, shells, whatever) is a morphological species (a "shap

      • It is always considered from one data point, that such a skeleton may not have been a healthy individual, but unusually small (or large in this case), sick or developmentally physically retarded somehow.

        If a future archaeologist stumbled across some 7'2 basketball player, it would be wrong to conclude a new gigantic species.

        You need to rule out admittedly unlikely oddities before declaring something new.

      • They found an extinct branch

        You don't know that. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were long presumed to be genetic dead ends, but we now know they were not. Perhaps Mr. Longi was not either.

        or a one-off genetic mutation

        That is an unlikely conclusion to draw from one data point.

        Well, the shitty journalist tricked you into suspecting this is a third branch. That helps the media, because then they can do another story re-explaining that this find is likely the first full Denisovan face they've found. Denisovans have previously been known mostly by DNA; a finger bone, a piece of a jaw.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Ya, I'm sure they wouldn't have considered that. Maybe you should tell them, I'm sure they'd listen to you.

    • The proposal, based on the features of this skull, is that the closest hominin relative - that is the last non-Home sapiens sapiens species we branched off of was this one, not the Neanderthal. That one thing changes a major fundamental assumed fact about human evolution. Yeah, one skull can change a lot given how thin the record is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      You're taking headline writers too seriously. I really doubt that any serious scientist thinks this will cause a massive rewrite of evolutionary history.

      That said, one should never believe claims that one fossil implies a "new species". Particularly if it is supposed to be able to interbreed with another species. One of the major definitional qualifications for being a species is being reproductively isolated.

      Even when they don't claim interbreeding, claiming a new species if often unwarranted. Consider

  • orly? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Friday June 25, 2021 @04:28PM (#61521380)
    Because no faked fossils have EVER come out of China in the past. They're definitely not known for making counterfeit sensational expensive items in the last 3 decades especially or anything.

    • Guess we'll find out if dragons existed.

    • *cough* *cough* piltdown man

    • Because no faked fossils have EVER come out of China in the past. They're definitely not known for making counterfeit sensational expensive items in the last 3 decades especially or anything.

      Oh, good. I was having doubts about this whole thing until I ran across your comment which provided me the assurances I needed to completely buy into story and never question it's authenticity, ever again. ;)

    • Fossils don't "come out of China." They're discovered in China, the research is published in China, and it is against the law in China to accuse somebody of having faked something that the Government already endorsed. If major corrections are made, they would not be published! They would only be disclosed to the team that made the mistakes.

      • If I recall correctly (it's at least 36 hours since I read the paper, wrote notes, and put it aside), the authorship was 14 people, from 10 institutions in 4 countries on 3 continents.

        and it is against the law in China to accuse somebody of having faked something that the Government already endorsed.

        Citation needed. Code name, law number and date of enactment, since you're obviously the local expert on Chinese law.

        (There are laws against libel and defamation, but that's a very different thing.)

        • Citation not needed, moron, look it the fuck up. You will find the relevant information. Citations are provided in academic papers, not in discussion of all the related issues. You're just trying to Declare Yourself Right without putting any burden on yourself to say anything.

          And your blah-blah didn't contradict me; the papers have authors from wherever, all based on analysis of the fossils done in China. Who the fuck cares if somebody halfway around the world was given access to parts of the data? You'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      Especially not if it's something that dates to an era when there was a huge market for faked artifacts.

  • I suppose anything is possible. Probable is a different story. It was said in the Old Testament that "There were giants in the Earth n those days". Curious how it says "in the earth" instead of "ON the earth".

    • Well we can just consider this evidence that talent recruitment [wikipedia.org] was an old practice.

    • You're overthinking a translation. The Hebrew can be read either way.

      • If memory serves, there were several giants in Philistia in those days that David slew.

        • Nah, David slew Goliath, who was just a Goliath-sized man. (Maybe he was only big in Harbin?)

          The word "Nephillm" is used in Genesis, and is sometimes translated as "giants," but nobody knows what that word really meant., and it isn't used anywhere else.

          • I don't have a Bible available right now, but if you read all of the story of David, it mentions him slaying other giants. I don't know if they were related, but it seems reasonable.
            • Considering the Mediterranean people thought and wrote of the Nordic people as giants, it just means "really big guys". They were about 5'7".
              • And considering that none of the giants that fought for the Philistines were of Nordic background, what difference does that make?
    • The Nephilim.

    • Curious how it says "in the earth" instead of "ON the earth".

      That's not even remotely curious.
      The part you find curious is a result of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation.
      Giants in particular is a funny one.
      Nephilim, the original word has been translated to 3 other things in extant bibles, with very different meanings.
      Another fun passage about the Nephilim:

      And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.

      Clearly, it's all a bunch of fucking fairy tales.

    • Curious how it says "in the earth" instead of "ON the earth".

      Not at all curious - it's an obvious reference to finding the skulls of sub-fossil ex-elephants in the pre-scientific Levant.

      See also, about 6 chapters in "Geology and Mythology [lyellcollection.org]", if you've got a spare £90.

  • just a disfigured human by birth too.

  • 23 cm tall and 15 cm wide?

    I'm 6' 6" and out of curiosity I measured my head dimensions. My head is about 21-22 cm tall and 14 cm wide. Subtract 1 cm from both for skin thickness and my head is still fairly close to the size of that "giant".

    I suspect that the measurements given in the article are misquoted.

    • 6 feet 6 is pretty tall, man, especially for the Chinese.

    • Ya, you are fucking huge compared to ancient humans, though.
      Even neanderthals only clocked in at 5'5".
    • Hunt down Chris Stringer's videos on the Harbin skull on the National History Museum's website (nhm.ac.uk, but I didn't make a not of the full URL) and you'll see that it's unusual in size overall, and particular aspects of it's shape.

      (When all you have to go on is bones, you need to measure carefully. That's where several years of a PhD in Anthropology goes - measuring bones, according to some very detailed guidelines. References are in the papers I read.)

      I suspect that the measurements given in the artic

  • “Homo longi is heavily built, very robust,” said Prof Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at Hebei. “It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans.”

    Sounds more like an average NFL defensive end.

    • That would be approximately correct, it would be similar.

      But I notice that many slashdotters seem to consider it very insightful to believe that extreme statistical outliers are in reality as likely as average cases. May be that we just found a giant individual of a new species, but it more far more likely to be closer to typical.

  • Great Well of China contains Great Human Skull Fossil

  • This skull is clearly from a cold adapted descendant of Homo heidelbergensis. We actually know of one of those Denisovans, which lived on the Tibetan Plateau and spread into South East Asia. We have a few bones, and their DNA from their bones, and modern human DNA of people who migrated through Asia 60,000+ years ago and interbred with them.

    So they probably haven't rewritten human evolution (but must keep up publication credits for tenure), they have just found another piece of it.

    • but must keep up publication credits for tenure

      That certainly doesn't apply to the UK author - he's had tenure for 30-odd years. I don't think the Chinese system works like that. So ... you're talking about the Australian authors?

      Was there an American author? I don't think so. So the American system doesn't apply.

  • "The skull, which is 23cm long and more than 15cm wide, is substantially larger than a modern humanâ(TM)s and has ample room, at 1,420ml, for a modern human brain."

    Um... that's about standard volume and dimensions for a late Neanderthal skull and brain. They're describing a big male Neanderthal, not some oddball no one's ever seen before.

    • Except the occipital sulcus (a trilete raised ridge of bone at the back of the head - typical of Neanderthals) isn't. It just isn't there. Not present.

      Also, there is a more pronounced narrowing of the skull behind the brow-ridge, and the facial plate is tucked under the frontal bones rather more than for Neanderthals.

      I don't know if this is discussed in detail in the journalism - it isn't worth reading. It is discussed in the papers. And ... bloody Elsevier's website are down now.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        How much do we know about the inheritance of such traits, and how much admixture it takes to suppress them? We call lots of people (some of them our neighbors) "modern humans" who have the Neanderthal "bun" (and I know someone who makes dentists spin in circles, because her family exhibits both that and a "Neanderthal jaw").

        At any rate, it's hardly a "giant" skull. A mix of traits not quite as expected, sure. DNA analysis would be more interesting.

        • How much do we know about the inheritance of such traits,

          WEll, they're heritable enough to have been recognisable traits for around a century - i.e., well before either DNA studies, or cladistic analysis of characters.

          DNA analysis would be more interesting.

          One can hope, but also one would expect that they tried repeatedly during the studies. I notice that they took about a half-dozen bone drillings from various parts of the base of the skull, to get samples for geochemical analysis and U-series dating. So I

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