A Mysterious New Type of Ancient Human Evolution

A new “sensational” episode. The environment he proposed a whole new group of ancient people – cousins ​​of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – who once lived in close proximity Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago.

The brains of these extinct humans, who probably hunted horses in small groups, were much larger than any other hominin of their time, including our own species.

Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and biologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawai’i named the new group Juluren, which means “big people”.

In the past, some scientists said that Juluren ((Homo juluensis) remains in the Denisovans (pronounced duh-nee-suh-vns), a group of ancient people, related to Neanderthals, who once lived near and even intermingled with modern humans in parts of Asia.

But Wu and Bae have taken a closer look, and say that features of some bones found in China cannot be easily assigned to modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, or Homo erectus, hominins came before our species.

Their mosaic of traits points to ancestral mixing between various hominin groups, all of which lived in the same regions of Asia between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.

“Together, these fossils represent a new type of large-brained hominin,” Wu and Bae concluded in the paper. PaleoAnthropology earlier this year.

“Although we started this project a few years ago, we did not expect to be able to propose a new type of hominin (human ancestors) and be able to organize hominin fossils from Asia into different groups,” said Bae.

Anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the research, called Bae and Wu’s latest comments “provocative”, and in his blog earlier this year, he reviewed their research and acknowledged that although the Juluren evidence is limited, the human record in Asia is “extensive” than many experts thought.”

Until recently, all hominin fossils found in China were inconsistent Homo erectus or Homo sapiens they were joined together. Compared to hominin fossils in Africa and Europe, the human fossil record in eastern Asia is less well classified and explained.

“Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a contrast to recent people, not as a description of their people across space and time,” Hawks wrote on his blog.

“I see the name Juluren not as a substitute for Denisovan, but as a reference to a certain group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups.”

In the past two decades alone, the human family tree has gone from a carefully pruned bonsai to a bustling river, and trying to separate and name all the various branches is proving quite a challenge.

Every few years, new lines seem to emerge, branching out into other branches of life before mysteriously ending.

In 2003, scientists found out Homo floresiensis – a small known species of people that lived at least 100,000 years ago on the island of Indonesia.

In 2007, archaeologists found Homo luzonensis – a completely new type of hominid from 67,000 years ago – in the Philippines.

In 2010, DNA analysis revealed the presence of ancient Denisovans in what is now Russia, near the border of Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

In 2018, paleoanthropologists were presented with fossils from northeastern China that turned out to be an extinct type of primitive human, possibly related to the Denisovans. Only in 2021, when scientists officially designate these species as Homo longi.

Now, Wu and Bae want to introduce Homo juluensis in the transition.

Various fossils H. juluensis they appear on the face and jaws, and clearly show the dental features of the primitive Neanderthals. But some features are not seen in other known hominins, including Denisovans.

“It is becoming more and more clear that [in] east Asian hominin fossils… a greater degree of morphological variation exists than was originally thought or expected,” write Wu and Bae.

In 2023, for example, scientists discovered a hominin fossil in Hualongdong, China, unlike any other human fossil on record. It’s not Denisovan, or Neanderthal, and it doesn’t fit right into it H. juluensis or H. longi.

Wu and Bae say this is a good example of “the complexity of the human evolutionary record.”

They write: “If anything, the east Asian record prompts us to see how complex evolution is in general and indeed forces us to revise and rethink our interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record.”

Analysis published in Natural Communication.

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