Is the ‘Dragon Man’ Skull Actually a New Human Ancestor?
A groundbreaking, recent discovery of a huge fossilized skull in China has archeologists embroiled in heated debate. Is this extraordinary finding evidence of a new human species?
Over the last several decades, the view of human evolution during the past half-million years has become ever more complicated with regular additions to the list of human species that lived during the Pleistocene period. Working out the relationship between these populations of early humans and how they relate to modern humans has proven difficult and, at times, contentious.
The new finding in China is one of the more recent additions to the growing debate.
Andrew Collins is an ancient history researcher who has been closely following these discoveries. “An incredible discovery has been made in China,” Collins said. “And this is of a fairly massive human skull. It’s around 140,000 years old. The first thing they’ve noticed is that it’s got features that are in common with Homo sapiens, but also archaic humans.”
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Skull Fragment of Missing Human Species Found in Israel
Archeologists in Israel have just made a groundbreaking discovery; could the skull they found belong to a new type of human and our oldest relative?
In recent years, the regular discovery of new species of archaic humans has been complicating the human family tree. The finding in Israel is the latest to fill in missing information on this ever-changing timeline of human evolution.
Andrew Collins is an ancient history researcher who has written extensively on the topic. “One of the most important discoveries in anthropology in recent years has been the finding of fragments of a human skull at a place named Nesher Ramla in Israel. It’s an open-air site that was functional between about 120,000-140,000 years ago,” Collins said.
“And the archeologists who have been working there have discovered, not only sophisticated stone tools, but they found fragments of this skull, and this skull is unique because it has elements of an archaic human that look similar to a Neanderthal, but also it has human elements.”
