Scientists SOLVE the mystery of the ‘Dragon Man': Ancient skull is first ever found from lost group of ancient humans that lived 217,000 years ago
But the mystery of the 'Dragon Man' skull has finally been solved - as a new study reveals its true identity.
Using DNA samples from plaque on the fossil's teeth, researchers have proven that the Dragon Man belonged to a lost group of ancient humans called the Denisovans.
This species emerged around 217,000 years ago and passed on traces of DNA to modern humans before being lost to time.
Denisovans were first discovered in 2010 when palaeontologists found a single finger of a girl who lived 66,000 years ago in the Denisova Cave in Siberia.
But with only tiny fragments of bones to work with, palaeontologists couldn't learn anything more about our long-lost ancestors.
Now, as the first confirmed Denisovan skull, the Dragon Man can provide scientists with an idead of what these ancient humans might have looked like.
Dr Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who was not involved in the study, told MailOnline: 'This is very exciting. Since their discovery in 2010, we knew that there is this other group of humans out there that our ancestors interacted with, but we had no idea how they looked except for some of their teeth.'
Scientists have finally solved the mystery of the 'Dragon Man' skull which belonged to an ancient human who lived 146,000 years ago
Scientists have now confirmed that the skull is that of a Denisovan (artist's impression), an ancient species of human which emerged around 217,000 years ago
The Dragon Man skull is believed to have been found by a Chinese railway worker in 1933 while the country was under Japanese occupation.
Not knowing what the fossilised skull could be but suspecting it might be important, the labourer hid the skull at the bottom of the well near Harbin City.
He only revealed its location shortly before his death, and his surviving family found it in 2018 and donated it to the Hebei GEO University.
Scientists dubbed the skull 'Homo Longi' or 'Dragon Man' after the Heilongjiang near where it was found, which translates to black dragon river.
The researchers knew that this skull didn't belong to either homo sapiens or Neanderthals but couldn't prove which other species it might be part of.
In two papers, published in Cell and Science, researchers have now managed to gather enough DNA evidence to prove that Dragon Man was a Denisovan.
Lead researcher Dr Qiaomei Fu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had previously tried to extract DNA from bones in the skull but had not been successful.
To find DNA, Dr Fu had to take tiny samples of the plaque that had built up on Dragon Man's teeth.
Previously, the only traces of Denisovans were small fragments of bone like these pieces found in Siberia which meant scientists didn't know what they might have looked like
Who is Dragon Man?
Dragon Man is the nickname for a skull found near Harbin City, China in 2018.
Known officially as the Harbin Cranium, scientists determined that the skull did not belong to any known human ancestor species.
Scientists gave it the titled Homo longi, meaning 'Dragon Man' after the Heilongjiang, or black dragon river, near where it was found.
Scientists suspected that Dragon Man might have been a member of the Denisovan species of humans but could not confirm this.
That was because the bones are so old that most traces of DNA have long since decayed.
As plaque builds up it sometimes traps cells from the inside of the mouth, and so there could be traces of DNA left even after 146,000 years.
When Dr Fu and her colleagues did manage to extract human DNA from the plaque, it was a match for samples of DNA taken from Denisovan fossils.
For the first time, scientists now have a confirmed Denisovan skull which means they can work out what our lost ancestors actually looked like.
The Dragon Man's skull has large eye sockets, a heavy brow and an exceptionally large and thick cranium.
Scientists believe that Dragon Man, and therefore Denisovans, would have had a brain about seven per cent larger than a modern human.
Reconstructions based on the skull show a face with heavy, flat cheeks, a wide mouth, and a large nose.
However, the biggest implication of the Dragon Man skull's identification is that we now know Denisovans might have been much larger than modern humans.
Dr Viola says: 'It emphasizes what we assumed from the teeth, that these are very large and robust people.
This also confirms that Dragon Man was from an older lineage of Denisovans which dates back to the earliest records around 217,000 years ago, rather than from the late Denisovan line which branched off around 50,000 years ago
'Harbin [the Dragon Man skull] is one of, if not the largest human cranium we have anywhere in the fossil record.'
However, scientists still have many questions about Denisovans that are yet to be answered.
In particular, scientists don't yet know whether Dragon Man reflects the full range of diversity that could have existed within the Denisovan population.
Dragon Man was probably a heavily-set, stocky hunter-gatherer built to survive the last Ice Age in northern China but Denisovan bones have been found in environments that weren't nearly as cold.
Professor John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told MailOnline: 'Harbin gives us a strong indication that some of them are large, with large skulls.
'But we have some good reasons to suspect that Denisovans lived across quite a wide geographic range, from Siberia into Indonesia, and they may have been in many different environmental settings.
'I wouldn't be surprised if they are as variable in body size and shape as people living across the same range of geographies today.'
THE DENISOVANS EXPLAINED
Who were they?
The Denisovans are an extinct species of human that appear to have lived in Siberia and even down as far as southeast Asia.
The individuals belonged to a genetically distinct group of humans that were distantly related to Neanderthals but even more distantly related to us.
Although remains of these mysterious early humans have mostly been discovered at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, DNA analysis has shown the ancient people were widespread across Asia.
Scientists were able to analyse DNA from a tooth and from a finger bone excavated in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia.
The discovery was described as 'nothing short of sensational.'
In 2020, scientists reported Denisovan DNA in the Baishiya Karst Cave in Tibet.
This discovery marked the first time Denisovan DNA had been recovered from a location that is outside Denisova Cave.
How widespread were they?
Researchers are now beginning to find out just how big a part they played in our history.
DNA from these early humans has been found in the genomes of modern humans over a wide area of Asia, suggesting they once covered a vast range.
They are thought to have been a sister species of the Neanderthals, who lived in western Asia and Europe at around the same time.
The two species appear to have separated from a common ancestor around 200,000 years ago, while they split from the modern human Homo sapien lineage around 600,000 years ago.
Last year researchers even claimed they could have been the first to reach Australia.
Aboriginal people in Australia contain both Neanderthal DNA, as do most humans, and Denisovan DNA.
This latter genetic trace is present in Aboriginal people at the present day in much greater quantities than any other people around the world.
How advanced were they?
Bone and ivory beads found in the Denisova Cave were discovered in the same sediment layers as the Denisovan fossils, leading to suggestions they had sophisticated tools and jewellery.
Professor Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said: 'Layer 11 in the cave contained a Denisovan girl's fingerbone near the bottom but worked bone and ivory artefacts higher up, suggesting that the Denisovans could have made the kind of tools normally associated with modern humans.
'However, direct dating work by the Oxford Radiocarbon Unit reported at the ESHE meeting suggests the Denisovan fossil is more than 50,000 years old, while the oldest 'advanced' artefacts are about 45,000 years old, a date which matches the appearance of modern humans elsewhere in Siberia.'
Did they breed with other species?
Yes. Today, around 5 per cent of the DNA of some Australasians – particularly people from Papua New Guinea – is Denisovans.
Now, researchers have found two distinct modern human genomes - one from Oceania and another from East Asia - both have distinct Denisovan ancestry.
The genomes are also completely different, suggesting there were at least two separate waves of prehistoric intermingling between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Researchers already knew people living today on islands in the South Pacific have Denisovan ancestry.
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