Ni et al., The Innovation, 2021
What if, instead of being considered a new human species, we look at the famous “dragon man” as part of a wider group of our ancestors? We won the first full skull of a denisovano.
The one discovered in the 1930s by a bridge worker has so far considered the only representative of an ancient human species, is after all part of a widest group of our extinct relatives – the denisovans.
In 2021, the skull was classified as a new species human antiga, or A person longbut a new investigation refutes this classification.
The Paleontologist Qiaomei Fu recently led two studies, one published in and one in which the team has recovered proteins from the petrous bone of the skull – one of the densest of the human body. They also managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from the bacterial plaque in the teeth of the “dragon man”.
“The discovery that Harbin’s human DNA is better preserved in dental calculation than in dense bones, including the Petrous Bone, suggests that dental calculation can be a valuable source to investigate DNA in average Pleistocenic hominers, ”write the authors.
But The “dragon-man” mitochondrial DNA reveals a relation to the species level with at least five other individuals known denisovans from fossils found in Siberia, explains the
And among the fragments of amino acids of 95 proteins found in their skull, four were unequivocally denisovans, and three coincided directly.
We may have “lost” a human species, but we won the first complete skull of a denisovan.
