‘Dragon Man’ skull may be the first from an enigmatic human cousin

Meet the new face, and braincase to boot, of Asia’s mysterious Stone Age denizens, the Denisovans.

The nearly complete, roughly 146,000-year-old skull of an adult male was found nearly a century ago, possibly during bridge construction in Harbin, China. An earlier study claimed that the Harbin skull, nicknamed Dragon Man, represented a new species called Homo longi. Two new studies now argue it is, instead, the first-ever skull from a Denisovan population — although scientists not involved in the new investigations disagree on whether enough evidence exists to confirm Dragon Man’s evolutionary identity.

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