The new piece is “provocative” inside Nature organized a new group of primitive people – the descendants of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – who used to live next to the. Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago.
The brains of these extinct people, who probably hunted horses in small groups, were much larger than any other hominin of their time, including our own species.
Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and anthropologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawaii named this new group Juluren, meaning “adult people”.
In the past, some scientists said Juluren ((Homo juluensis) fossils to the Denisovans (pronounced duh-nee-suh-vns), who are a group of ancient people, related to Neanderthals, who once lived together and even met modern humans in parts of Asia.
But Wu and Bae took a closer look, and they say that the remains of some fossils found in China cannot be attributed to modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, or homo erectus, hominins came before our species.
Their genetic makeup suggests a mixture of ancestry between different hominin groups, all living in the same areas of Asia between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.
“Together, these fossils represent a new form of hominin with a brain,” concluded Wu and Bae in the journal. PaleoAnthropology earlier this year.
Fossils from Xujiayao. (Wu, 2024)
“Although we started this project several years ago, we did not expect to be able to provide a new type of hominin (human ancestors) and to be able to organize hominin fossils from Asia into different groups,” says Bae.
Anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the research, calls Bae and Wu’s latest comment “irritating”, and in his blog earlier this year, he reviewed their study and admitted that while the evidence for Juluren is limited, the human record in Asia “is more extensive than many experts have thought.”
Until recently, all hominin fossils found in China were inconsistent Homo erectus not at all Homo sapiens they gathered together. Compared to hominin fossils in Africa and Europe, the human records in eastern Asia are not well differentiated and defined.
“Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense as a distinction of recent people, not as a description of their population in space and time,” writes Hawks on his blog.
“I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to another group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups.”
Examples of related fossils Homo juluensis (five blue pointed stars), including Xujiayao, Xuchang, Xiahe, Penghu, Denisova, and Tam Ngu Hao 2. (Bae & Wu, Nature Communications2024)
In just the past two decades, the human family has gone from a well-pruned bonsai to a bushy mess, and trying to separate and name all the different branches is proving problematic.
Every few years, it seems, new lines emerge, moving in and out of other branches of life before coming to an inexplicable end.
In 2003, scientists discovered Homo floresiensis – a small tribe of people who lived more than 100,000 years ago on the island of Indonesia.
In 2007, archaeologists found Homo luzonensis – a new type of hominid from 67,000 years ago – in the Philippines.
In 2010, DNA analysis revealed the presence of ancient Denisovans in what is now Russia, near the border of Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
In 2018, paleoanthropologists were presented with a fossil from northeastern China that turned out to be an extinct species of ancient humans, possibly related to the Denisovans. Only in 2021, scientists officially named the animal as Homo longi.
Now, Wu and Bae want to introduce Homo juluensis revolution.
The various remains of H. juluensis they come from the face and jaw, and they apparently show ancient Neanderthal-like dental patterns. But some traits are not seen in other known hominins, including the Denisovans.
“It is becoming clear that [in] Eastern Asian hominin fossils… a greater amount of morphological variation exists than was originally thought or expected,” write Wu and Bae.
In 2023, for example, scientists found a hominin fossil in Hualongdong, China, unlike any other human fossil on record. It’s not a Denisovan, or a Neanderthal, and it doesn’t fit in H. juluensis not at all H. longi.
Wu and Bae say this is a good example of “the complexity of the literature on human evolution.”
“If anything,” they write, “the east Asian record is making us realize how complex human evolution is and forcing us to revise and rethink our explanations of various types of evolution to better fit the growing fossil record.”
The explanation was published internally Nature Communications.