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A 146,000-year-old skull could reshape humanity's family tree. The skull was first discovered by a Chinese worker in 1933, but he hid it in a well because he didn't want Japanese soldiers to take it.
The skull remained hidden until 2018 when the worker told his grandchildren about his discovery before he died. They donated the skull to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University in China, where researchers began to study the fossilized skull.
The skull, known as the Harbin cranium, was the subject of three different studies, which examined its unique characteristics. A new study published in the journal The Innovation suggests that the skull represents a new human species, Homo longi, or the Dragon Man.
"It differs from all the other named Homo species by presenting a combination of features, such as long and low cranial vault, a wide and low face, large and almost square orbits, gently curved but massively developed supraorbital torus, flat and low cheekbones with a shallow canine fossa, and a shallow palate with thick alveolar bone supporting very large molars," the researchers wrote.
Paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is an author on all three studies, told National Geographic that the Harbin cranium was unlike anything thing else he had ever seen.
"You have a very strange feeling when you look into the eye sockets," Ni said. "You're always thinking, he's trying to tell you something."
Professor Chris Stringer from London's Natural History Museum told the BBC that the discovery is one of the most important in history and reshapes our understanding of how humans evolved.
"In terms of fossils in the last million years, this is one of the most important yet discovered," Stringer said. "What you have here is a separate branch of humanity that is not on its way to becoming Homo sapiens (our species), but represents a long-separate lineage which evolved in the region for several hundred thousand years and eventually went extinct."