Scientists link elusive human group to 150,000-year-old Chinese ‘dragon man’
Evidence from the DNA traces left by #Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, probably travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They interbred with modern humans.
Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our information about their existence. Only a jaw fragment, a few bits of bone and one or two teeth provide any evidence of their physical characteristics.
But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged.
This is #Homo#longi
– or “Dragon man”
– from Harbin in north-east China.
This key fossil is made up of an almost complete skull with a braincase as big as a modern human’s and a flat face with delicate cheekbones. Dating suggests it is at least 150,000 years old.
“We now believe that the Denisovans were members of the Homo longi species,” said Prof Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, last week. “The latter is characterised by a broad nose, thick brow ridges over its eyes and large tooth sockets.”
The possible Denisovan-Homo longi link is one of several recent developments by researchers working on these humans with whom Homo sapiens shared the planet for hundreds of thousands of years. It is thought they could have played a key role in our own evolution.
Scientists in Tibet have discovered a Denisovan gene in local people, the result of interbreeding between the two species in the distant past.
Crucially, this gene has been shown to help modern men and women survive at high altitudes.
In addition, evidence to support the Denisovan-Homo longi link has also been traced to the Tibetan plateau, where scientists began studying a jawbone initially found in a remote cave 3,000 metres (10,000ft) above sea level by a Buddhist monk, who kept it as a relic.
The bone was found not to come from a modern human. But only when researchers began to study the cave where the jawbone had been originally discovered did they find its sediments were rich in Denisovan DNA.
