Hominid with giant skull and teeth discovered in China could be new human species

Scientists advocate classifying a new extinct group that lived in northern China until 120,000 years ago as a separate species. It has big teeth, a huge skull — and it raises a lot of questions about Humans.

“This is a very substantial difference between the A wise man modern, the Neanderthal and this new species now proposed”, explains Christopher Baeprofessor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and one of the scientists who named the new species as The man of July.

Ju luin Chinese, means huge head.

“When we think about The man of Julywe are facing a very robust population of hominids”, adds researcher, from the Hawaiian University. The species lived between 200 and 160 thousand years ago.

They were skilled and organized hunters, having mastered primitive tools and spear-like weapons which they used to kill wild horses.

They did everything with the animals: they ate the meat and even the bone marrow, and used their skins to make clothes to face the harsh Chinese winters. They had relatively large heads with low and wide skulls that accommodated teeth of considerable size.

The average cranial capacity of modern adult Homo sapiens is about 1,350 cm³while Neanderthals, who existed until about 40,000 years ago, had a cranial capacity of about 1,450 cubic centimeters. The skull of The man of July measured between 1,700 and 1,800 cm³.

Em Xujiayaoin China, researchers not only unearthed bone fragments from 16 individuals, they also discovered thousands of artifacts: stone tools and animal bones. And they all point to a horse slaughter site.

“Probably hunted in groups — surrounded a group of horses and attacked them as a group. In Xujiayao, they were probably process the skins with one of these tools“, explained Bae.

“Recent research initiatives in China and East Asia are clearly showing that Several hominid lineages were present during the Late Quaternary“, reads the , recently published in Nature Communications.

Even though the first Homo juluensis were already described in the 1970sat the time there was no talk of a new species. It is only now that, with the discovery of more fossils of this type, there is talk of a significant difference in relation to Neanderthals.

According to researchers, the , whose bone fragments were discovered in a cave of the same name in southern Siberia, and who were identified as cousins ​​of the Neanderthals, should be included in Homo juluensis due to the corresponding dental features.

But the discovery has generated controversy. Bae states that his proposal would likely be debated by paleoanthropologists because “many Westerners said that Chinese fossils should be called Denisovan and not the other way around“. But scientists argue that Denisovan is the name of a general population — not a species.

“The East Asian record is leading us to recognize how complex human evolution in general is and the force us to review and rethink our interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record”, concludes the researcher.

Bae insists, and will not give a weak part: “Based on the analysis of the teeth and the dating, we think that the Denisovans most likely belong to Homo juluensisbased on their similarities”, he said. It is important to “decolonize our countryside so that Asian paleoanthropology stands on its own” and “eventually for the name juluensis to be accepted”.