Homo longi

Homo longi is an extinct species of archaic human identified from a nearly complete skull, nicknamed 'Dragon Man', from Harbin on the Northeast China Plain, dating to at minimum 146,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene.

Like other archaic humans, the skull is low and long, with massively developed brow ridges, wide eye sockets, and a large mouth.

Recognizing its importance, likely as a result of public interest in anthropology that had recently been generated by the Peking Man in 1929, just four years before, he hid it from the Manchukuo authorities in an abandoned well.

[3][4] In 2021, Chinese geologist Shao Qingfeng and colleagues performed non-destructive x-ray fluorescence, rare-earth element, and strontium isotope analyses on the skull and various other mammalian fossils unearthed around Dongjiang Bridge, and determined that all the fossils from the vicinity were likely deposited at around the same time, lived in the same region, and probably originate from the Upper Huangshan Formation, dating to 309 to 138 thousand years ago.

Nonetheless, the skull is well-constrained to the late Middle Pleistocene, roughly contemporaneous with other Chinese specimens from Xiahe, Jinniushan, Dali, and Hualong Cave.

[6] However, according to a more recent assessment (including among its authors Xijun Ni, one of the describers of the species H. longi), since Wu wrote only that "it is suggested that Dali cranium probably represents a new subspecies" (p. 538, italics added for emphasis) the name daliensis was never validly published according to International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) rules, being proposed conditionally and published after 1960 (and not formally proposed by subsequent workers in the intervening period), and is therefore unavailable and thus could not compete with longi for priority.

[7] Based on the conspicuously massive size of the molars, they suggested H. longi is most closely related to and possibly the same species as the Xiahe mandible from Tibet,[2] which has been grouped with the enigmatic Denisovans, an archaic human lineage apparently dispersed across East Asia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene currently identifiable from only a genetic signature.

[1] Despite the face being so wide, it was rather flat (reduced mid-facial prognathism), and resembles the anatomy found in modern humans, the far more ancient H. antecessor, and other Middle Pleistocene Chinese specimens.

The H. longi skull's mosaic morphology of archaic and derived traits converges with some of the earliest specimens assigned to H. sapiens from Africa, notably Rabat[10] and Eliye Springs.

Because the original describers judged the Harbin skull to be closely allied with the Xiahe mandible, they believed H. longi lacked a chin, like other archaic humans, but the specimen's lower jaw was not recovered.

The skull was discovered in 1933 along Dongjiang Bridge [ zh ] (above), then under construction by Manchukuo National Railway .
The Harbin skull is similar to the contemporaneous Dali skull (reconstruction above). [ 1 ]