Scientists in China have just discovered a new human species called Homo longi, and now all I can think of are the ‘long boi’ memes.
A team of scientists from China, Australia and Britain have just identified a mystery skull called the Harbin cranium.
The Harbin cranium was actually originally discovered in 1933 as a ~mysterious~ fossil near Harbin City in the Heilongjiang province of north-eastern China, and it’s taken nearly a century to classify it as a new human species. (Side note, but this is just so up my Old And Weird Science niche. Old, unidentifiable skulls are where true crime/forensic nerds and history nerds collide, and I love it here.)
Anyway, back to The Science: The Harbin cranium is massive – much bigger than that of our humble Homo sapien skulls, as well as every other human species, but despite that, Homo Longi does not have big brain energy. The brain size was either similar to, or smaller than ours. Scientists didn’t really know what to make of it until now.
Homo longi (meaning dragon river after the province it was found), or the Dragon Man, is thought to be an unknown, long extinct species of human that lived in East Asia around 146,000 years ago. The only remnant of this species we have so far is literally just the one skull, which is believed to belong to a 50 year old man.
Yet despite that, this artist went fucking wild and gave us a horny and very jacked artist rendition of Homo longi. Like, is it just lockdown or did the artist turn the Dragon Man into Dragon Daddy?
I’m especially convinced that this drawing is a little too horny now that I’ve seen this, far less horny one:
Anyway, the Homo longi discovery is actually really cool for more reasons than just being new and shiny – it’s also thought to be the closest human species to us, replacing the Neanderthals. The classification requires the cultivating of a new human family tree – and that means changing the entire course of human evolution.
