‘Dragon Man’ skull may be new species, shaking up human family tree | Hacker News Reader

‘Dragon Man’ skull may be new species, shaking up human family tree

nationalgeographic.com

157 pointspseudolus118 comments

I'm always rather skeptical, because I've known so many people with such wildly varying bones and shapes, that one outlier makes a difference.

I for example have an enormous head, bigger than a size 10 hat. I also have that weird protruding ridge on the back.

In 10k years is someone going to think I'm a different species?

Yes if there's gap in history where all recorded data are lost and you are one of a few specimen they dug up, along with Peter Dinklage and Shaq.

That's a good metaphor for what is going on.

Not really. Pick a random skull out of the 7 billion humans that exist today. How likely are you to get a Peter Dinklage or a Shaq?

Also, pretty sure archaeologists aren't dumb. The idea that this might be an outlier specimen probably occurred to them? They're obviously synthesizing a lot more information than just this one skull.

>Perhaps aware of the magnitude of the find, the man secreted the skull away in an abandoned well.

>Before his death, the worker who found the skull disclosed his long-held secret to his grandchildren

Love how cinematic the details of this story are.

Without the forced email signup

https://outline.com/U5FfW2

Thank you!

you can just put in any random email and it works, e.g. asdflkjasdfljasdlfjasdf@gmail.com

Hey, that's my email address!

With increasing cookie warnings, email signup modals, adblock notices, nth article advisories, and other annoyances, I go directly to Safari reader view more every day. It works quite well.

I'd like to think that in 2021 a 3D model of this skull that you could print would would be widely available for those in the field.

Googled for a few minutes and came up empty. Too bad.

I have seen it done in archeology occasionally, but for all science which depends on the shape of specific samples, this shape should be available as a 3D model for printing. It should be a huge boost if any researcher could "reproduce" these samples. And great for educational purposes, if you could bring a copy to a school class room.

How do we know if a singular skull, whether this or another, was not simply a mutation and not part of a distinct species?

It's incredibly unlikely for such a mutation to occur, the individual make it to adulthood, and for their remains to be recognizable after 140,000 years. The principle of mediocrity implies that this person was probably of a relatively common variety at the time.

I find it fascinating that this ancient creature from nearly 150K years ago was both kinda ripped and kinda clothed.

He also is looking at his arrowhead like it is a smartphone and he’s posing for a selfie. Does anyone, when working or inspecting their work, strike poses?

fyi, I think that's a knife, not an arrow/spear head. The original all purpose tool

For making selfies, too! ;)

> Now, nearly 90 years later, a study published in the journal The Innovation makes the case that this skull represents a new human species: Homo longi, or the Dragon Man.

How does one get "Dragon Man" from Homo longi, besides for marketing? Longi translates to long, not to dragon.

I assume they're referencing luong, the Chinese word for dragon, but making it pseudo-Latin.

That's about in line with marketing practices, sounds believable

"Long 龍" is Mandarin Chinese for "dragon"

Do they often mix latin and chinese - or any other languages?

Changmiania liaoningensis, named after the Liaoning province, comes to mind, and a trilobite named Han Solo[0] after the Han people of China.

There are entire lists named after Harry Potter[1], Tolkien[2], and Pokemon[3]. Scientists are both utter nerds and not terribly stuck on sticking to Latin and Greek for their naming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(trilobite)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_named_after_...

[2] http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Species_named_after_Tolkien's...

[3] https://gamerant.com/species-named-after-pokemon/

Yes; species names are all over the place. This one at least means something in Latin, which is not always guaranteed. There’s a moth called Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, for instance (similar hair). Looking a bit Latin-y is generally considered sufficient.

In the paper they describe the etymology of the name like this: "The species name is derived from the geographic name Long Jiang, which is a common usage for the Heilongjiang Province and literally means “dragon river.”"

Long or lóng is the pronunciation of dragon in chinese/mandarin chinese. You can google pinyin of dragon to check.

Long is not dragon. It was just forced upon the language because the dominance of the English culture and civilization.

http://blog.tutorming.com/expats/chinese-dragon-western-diff...

You might find Wikipedia a better source[0]. The etymology of the word dragon describes a giant serpent, very similar to what 龍 represents. Many different cultures have a creature like this, not just Chinese and English.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon

Not convincing to me. Lots of mythical creatures share with same animal roots. That does not make them the same or equivalent.

Westerners naturally identified the Chinese 龍 with dragons, and so did the Chinese in reverse. The people that were directly involved found them equivalent, which is what matters.

Keep in mind the « Westerners » were mostly Italian, not English, and that the Dragon in question was that of Saint George's iconography [1], a serpent with wings and quite often hair.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitale_da_bologna,_s...

See, that's what serious discussion brings about. Now I am fully on board with the idea that dragon has a long cultural history and is appropriate to use on loong or 龙.

The sad part is that the down voting is plainly distasteful.

I hope people see the importance to maintain the right behavior pattern to enoucrage high quality discussion.

It must be the first few explorers made the connection and everyone just followed. The same with many things named by Westerners. I found many things are not equivalent due to culture differences, but there is no way to translate if you don't approximate it to something in the other culture. I am just surprised that a correction has not been proposed by Chinese.

I don't think this is due to the 'dominance' of English. The connection between Western and Chinese dragons is probably a lot older and goes back to the earliest contacts during the Middle Ages by European explorers (who weren't English in most cases).

Nowadays there's a relatively strict idea in Western fantasy art of what a dragon is supposed to look like, but that's a fairly new development.

You make it sound like Chinese dragons not having a separate word in English is somehow a nefarious plot when in reality it's just that people noticed that these creatures are pretty similar and used the same word to describe them. This happens all the time. I would say Westerners are fairly aware that a Chinese dragon is different from a Western one even if the same word is used.

I only did a cursory look on Chinese Wikipedia, but it seems like Western dragons are also referred to as 龍 in Mandarin. Is this also forced upon the West due to the dominance of Chinese culture and civilization?

Dragon and Long (loong) are two different thing. I am not sure why historically translators have made the connection between these two. Long is a god and Dragon is a monster. There is nothing similar between these two creatures.

Was anybody else annoyed by bodybuilder type 6 pack in the illustration. While ancient man would have been realtively lean I doubt a 6 pack is an accurate representation. A quick Google of modern hunter gatherer societies shows lean people but no 6 packs. Maybe I'm wrong or being too picky?

Yes it's weird to be triggered by the physical fitness of an illustration. Maybe time to hit the gym?

A 6 pack would be normal, it's dictated by body fat and even the weakest people would have visible, albeit tiny, 6 packs showing.

The inaccurate representation in the photo is the fact that you'd need a shitload of calories to be able to put on that much mass, while working out pushing serious weight a few times a week. So yeah, completely inaccurate unless this guy was benching deer before eating them solo.

But annoyed? No. That's sounds like insecurity. Time to hit the gym bro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians#/media/...

Here is an image of a few Aboriginal Australian men, who could plausibly be the closest human relatives to this fossil (assuming closely related to Denisovan).

The artist impression is somewhat exaggerated, maybe inspired by chimp musculature? But still not too out there.

Modern humans as hunter gatherers may or may not have six packs (depends mostly on body fat percentage, which would be smaller in bad times), but they are very much not-bodybuilders. The # of protein to build and maintain a bodybuilder-like level of muscle is only available to people from sedentary civilizations, and only to some of them.

The Neanderthals were probably more robust than we are, but it might also have spelt their doom: H. sapiens sapiens could operate more efficiently within the same natural constraints.

BTW Do not be that much annoyed, a high BMI is a source of its own problems even if that person is lean and not fat. For example, our knees and hips are not designed to carry too much weight. I wouldn't like to cross BMI of 25 or 26 ever.

Could this be the long missing Peking man?

That artistic rendering is a lot. Not sure that's what they'd look like.

While this debate is very interesting from an academic level, it should also be noted that it exists as a part of a nationalistic Chinese history of claiming a unique anthropological history of the Han as emerging from a separate course of evolution. [1] In some case scholars have gone as far as claiming an “out-of-asia” theory as opposed to the broadly accepted African origin of humanity [1]. Whereas these fossils could very well represent a new species of “Dragon Man” (note the mythical/national connection in the name) these claims need to be understood within the social and political framework of their originating nation.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-china-is-rewr...

> In some case scholars have gone as far as claiming an “out-of-asia” theory as opposed to the broadly accepted African origin of humanity

My favorite over-the-top example of this:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mandarin-chine...

tl;dr: some Chinese "scholars" claim English is a Mandarin dialect and Europe had no history before the 15th century (and Greece, Rome, etc. were fabricated in imitation of Chinese history).

We had our fair share of scholars in the west thinking there was no civilization in North America before Columbus.

We do? I've never even heard of this idea. Just debates about exactly how many thousands of years ago people got here.

...unless you mean "civilization" in terms of "not savages" which is totally unrelated kind of dumbness.

Civilization has at its root the concept of cities, so by that standard it's fair to say that large parts of North America had no civilizations.

Whether this is particularly important is open to debate; I prefer to think that it is relevant (cities allow for specialization) but should not be considered a sign of sophistication.

Most archaeologists and anthropologists don't like the term 'civilization' as a whole because it's overloaded with these outdated connotations that reflect the biases of the speaker rather than anything meaningful about the society under discussion. You can repeat the first sentence to any Americanist you like and see if they agree with the spirit of what it says.

There were a 100M Native Americans just a few years before Europeans arrived. They mostly died to a plague, but there were cities with millions.

Note that I specified North America. Most of the cities were in Central or South America.

Mexico is in North America, buddy.

Not according to the UN: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for...

The UN scheme deliberately uses the term "Northern America" to differentiate it from the continent of a similar name. The second sentence on the wiki page says as much:

> Note that the continent of North America comprises the intermediate regions of the Caribbean, Central America, and Northern America.

The UN uses that scheme because Mexico is part of the Latin America region and makes more sense grouped with them for statistical purposes than with the US and Canada.

Sounds like you understood him perfectly well, then. Not sure why all this writing was necessary in that case.

Because Mexico is in North America, despite what Colin said? Seems worth clarifying.

After a tour de force comment like the one at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639407 I'm inclined to want more writing from this person, not less.

Most people in the world don't seem to have any problem with distinguishing North-America-the-Continent from North-America-the-Region depending on context. For example in my native tongue there's not even a way of phrasing them differently. Yet humans can somehow disambiguate the two just fine.

Even if you interpret my comment to mean something other than what I meant, what I said is still true: Large parts of North America had no cities prior to European settlement.

Like everything in archaeology, that depends on your definitions. Restricting the scope to the lower 48 for sanity and taking Michael Smith's attributes of urbanism (a good default starting point), a good chunk of the US had pre-columbian urbanism. The southwest and southeast are inarguable. The Midwest had similar urban agglomerations on a smaller scale. The PNW and California (aside from the bits already described by 'the southwest') displayed most attributes aside from "true agriculture", which is a silly eurocentric concept anyway. That leaves the Northeast where I'm simply not familiar enough with the archaeology to comment.

Florida, possibly a bit of the plains, and the upper northeast could be said to lack cities, sure. That's a far cry from how I understand your statement. What am I missing here?

Canada? There were a few cities in what is now southern Ontario but AFAIK that's about it.

Is there a point be made by including areas that continue to lack cities and urbanization even today? I was assuming that you were making a point about pre-contact demography in North America being unique in some way. If you were just stating random characteristics it shares with every other continent, my mistake I guess?

Umm... Canada is highly urbanized.

I give up.

Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.

In North America, the largest city, Cahokia, had 15,000 - 20,000 and peaked around 1100 AD. North America was mostly a stone age culture without a lot of cities.

You had more advanced civilizations in central and south america.

The Aztecs were the biggest. The largest urban area were the two sister cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. Again, population estimates are hard to come by, but 200,000–400,000 inhabitants are estimated for Tenochtitlan and half that for Tlatelolco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan

Teotihuacan was the largest city in the Americas during the classical period, beginning to decline around 600 AD and virtually dissapearing by 1000 AD. Peak population of 150-250,000 around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan

The absolutely fascinating Olmecs (with the enormous heads and jade masks), were the largest before then, but they died out around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmecs

Population estimates for their biggest city, La Venta, are about 20,000 people.

Teotihuacan had about 125K around 500 A.D, but again collapsed by around 1000 AD.

In South America, the largest Incan city, Cusco, had a peak population of up to 150,000.

https://www.worldhistory.org/Cuzco/

Tikal, the largest Mayan city, had about 200,000 (Peaking around 900 A.D)

Etc

> In North America, the largest city, Cahokia, had 15,000 - 20,000 and peaked around 1100 AD.

> You had more advanced civilizations in central and south america.

Central America is part of North America.

Sounds like a category error. Regions vs. continents.

> Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.

Hardly any cities anywhere had ever had 1m people at that time. A quick google puts ancient Rome at 450,000, ancient Athens at 200,000, and London in 1500AD at 50,000 (200,000 by 1600AD)

Can't edit. I'm off by half an order of magnitude and I'm not sure when I picked the incorrect information up.

Tens of millions of Native Americans / indigenous peoples. Much larger area, so cities with tens of thousands, not millions.

the dumbness is not unrelated.

How many of them in the last (conservatively) 100 years? This "the entire history of western civilization is China fanfic" deal is from 2019.

ehh no one in china takes these claims seriously

if i've learned anything in the last year... there might actually be a sizeable amount of people (who you might not interact with on daily basis) that actually deeply believe it

If you are taking about relative importance, then these people's voice will be negaliable compared to main stream views.

If you are talking about absolute number, then of course it could be substantial, but that's true for any situation, I.e., there are just more people there.

Haven't we learned anything when looking at America over the past 5 years? "Nobody important actually thinks that" becomes legitimate nationalistic pride.

Well, that's one thing I now point out often to American people (I was born and raised in China), American nationalism is not same as Chinese one. To some degree, Chinese nationalism went beyond the narrow view point already in the Mao era. Chinese people nowadays are very sensitive to nationalism topics, but they are also rational. I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. It's that Chinese people have a conviction that they can do whatever other people can do, and probably can do some better. That's one benefit of tight propaganda control, as the CCP knows very well how powerful and uncontrollable the nationalism can be. So they are relatively adept in managing the sentiment.

"I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. It's that Chinese people have a conviction that they can do whatever other people can do, and probably can do some better"

Are you sure about this? Because if the view that humanity developed in china is still popular, despite strong dna evidence suggesting otherwise - I do see nationalistic skewing of facts here.

> humanity developed in china is still popular

Factually wrong statement

1. The claim was that Chinese were developed in the China land. Not humanity as a whole

2. People do not take such claim seriously.

Your statement appears that majority or at least large number of Chinese support this ridiculous claim.

> 2. People do not take such claim seriously.

This reads "I don't, and I assume others don't, too", which, again, America has proven even the most ridiculous of ideas are believed by _some_, and oftentimes _lots_ of people.

Isn't that need to considered in relative term? Some people showing certain behavior, when they are below certain percentage, just not going to affect the overall outlook of the nation. And we are talking about the national sentiment of China, comparably speaking, that applies to equally large scale sentiment in US. For example, there are a lot of people believe in flat earth theory, but that does not stand to be a US sentiment, one cannot claim that US people believe in flat earth. Same, one cannot claim Chinese people believe they are evolved from independent source than people living in other countries.

> For example, there are a lot of people believe in flat earth theory, but that does not stand to be a US sentiment,

Nobody but you in this thread is speaking in absolutes. _Some_ to _lots of_ US citizens believe the earth is flat.

> Same, one cannot claim Chinese people believe they are evolved from independent source than people living in other countries.

_Some_ to _lots of_ Chinese people _do_ believe this. You keep saying "Nobody actually thinks ___", which isn't true.

Never meant to say nobody actually think. I was saying it's ratio is very low. My English might not be precise.

> I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. ... That's one benefit of tight propaganda control, as the CCP knows very well how powerful and uncontrollable the nationalism can be.

CCP propaganda has a long, terrible history, to the present day. They require compliance with it and hire people to spread it. The CCP regularly stirs up nationalism, for example over the Nine Dashed Line.

You prove my point, I.e., CCP can very well manage China's nationalism sentiment.

My parents believe that Coliseum and Notre Dame weren't built by humans, so yeah pretty safe bet!

Who do they think built them?

Some kind of highly anthropomorphic non-human entity is highly popular throughout history.

ayylmaos?

Flavian Amphitheatre ("Colosseum"): Sasquatch Trolls.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris: A fragile temporary alliance of vampires and werewolves.

Obviously.

Then who are they for? Certainly no one outside China takes them seriously, either.

Party officials. The more absurd the claim, the more loyal you are. Extremely few actually believe these statements, but the statements are more widely viewed as being politically useful.

No way! What a weird system. Is democracy vulnerable to this?

How sure of that are you? This sounds remarkably similar to the claims about, say, Great Zimbabwe; up until the 20th century, almost everyone assumed it was built by some sort of outsider (weirder contenders include the Queen of Sheba!) rather than the locals, and indeed in Rhodesia, where the site was located, it was not permitted to question this until the regime collapsed. Professional modern archaeologists didn’t buy this, of course, but it hardly mattered; normal people believed it because they were told it.

> ehh no one in china takes these claims seriously

I know that. I believe they were roundly mocked on Chinese social media, but the claims are so over the top to be utterly hilarious.

We have our share of crackpots like those in our country as well. No one takes them seriously. Most of them do not even have a history on anthropology degree. They're the laughing stock of younger history majors.

The thing about crackpots with wildly unsubstantiated self-aggrandizing anthropological theories is that they often wield disproportionate power and influence. Take the Mormon church for example: they believe Native Americans were white Jews who were cursed with dark skin and it was god's will they be wiped out by European settlers. It's horrifically racist and there's zero evidence to support the origin story. And yet, the church holds over $100 billion in their investment portfolio alone and nearly had one of their own elected as US president. It's hard to laugh at.

The US is just crazy. This is especially after I've seen the people who've stormed the Capitol with Qanon t-shirts.

We're practicaly neighbours with the Mormon mission here but they seem all right. Friendly, very clean, tall. It's true that they're all white.

Religion fundamentalists the world over very angrily push their myths as literal facts, and often politicians have to at least somewhat indulge them.

While multiple US examples are probably well known here, I’d like to suggest one from India from circa 2008, the controversy over the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal.

India wanted to dig a “canal” (more like dredge a shipping channel) in the waters between India and Sri Lanka. Religious fundamentalists opposed this because it would involve cutting a natural rock formation. What so special about these rocks? Well they were placed there by Lord Ram and his army of monkeys as chronicled in the Ramayana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethusamudram_Shipping_Canal_P...

I guess the out of India theory has competition! All hail nationalism comedy!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Aryanism

If you actually read the scientific American article cited, you can see that the title is click baiting.

The only direct statement for the point of the title:

"""

Some Western researchers suggest that there is a hint of nationalism in Chinese palaeontologists' support for continuity. “The Chinese — they do not accept the idea that H. sapiens evolved in Africa,” says one researcher. “They want everything to come from China.”

Chinese researchers reject such allegations. “This has nothing to do with nationalism,” says Wu. It's all about the evidence — the transitional fossils and archaeological artefacts, he says. “Everything points to continuous evolution in China from H. erectus to modern human.”

"""

And the rest of the article enumerates many evidences that prove the evidences uncovered in China and many other Asian countries pose a lot of questions of the established theory.

I don't think it's fair to put nationalism at the center of the discussion.

Edit: I would not expected down voting on this comment if this was in before 2016 (just rough impression). Now I fully prepared to it. The lack of inter exchange is killing the vitality of this forum. Hope this idea becomes more evident here. After all, there are so many pther places to not engage in serious discussion, this forum is most valuable when it predominantly values facts.

No, the nationalism is a real issue, though it's not a majority view among Chinese researchers.

What Wu claims above is directly and unambiguously contradicted by genetic evidence. Han are overwhelmingly O-M122 (sometimes written as O2 or O3) which absolutely goes back to the common African ancestor. You can look up the lineage yourself on the wikipage for haplogroups. What's true is they're a fairly recent split off the "spine"

This is a settled matter, not one where HN is somehow censoring evidence based debate. The argument is fundamentally dishonest vs the evidence in total.

Edit:

Just to follow up with more useful information:

What we are learning that's overturning some conventional views from recent digs in India and across Asia is about how technology/culture diffused amongst modern humans once they were resigning there. We're finding it was more of a web than a linear diffusion as previously thought. But that's all, again, among modern humans, not evidence of independent evolution of the Han people from homo erectus.

> No, the nationalism is a real issue

Sure, totally agree.

I was pointing out it's not fair to pick this issue for this particular new discovery.

Science is never settled. That's how science do.

Why a debate needs to be understood within social and political framework? A debate should be based on evidence, nothing else. If a Trump supporter has some evidence to support his claim, you shouldn't discard his opinion because he is in the different political camp.

The bible calls them the nephlim

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