A large fossil skull, now dated to around 146,000 years ago, was found in 1933 near Harbin, China. I had features that were different from any known homo species. Now a team of scientists from China, Australia, and Britain have concluded that it belonged to a new species dubbed Homo longi, which is taxonomically closer to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals are.
The Harbin team generated a family tree (“phylogeny”) of human lineages to work out how the species relates to modern humans. This tree is based on morphological data from 95 largely complete fossil specimens of different hominin species living during the Middle Pleistocene, including Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens along with their known ages. The tree also suggests that five previously unidentified fossils from northeastern China are from Homo longi.
The relationships between the species are based on morphology, and may be adjusted when intact DNA is found, if it ever is. The dates assigned to the divergence of species is even less reliable, although the order in which the species diverged should remain as exact dates are adjusted. Read more about this breakthrough at Discover magazine.
(Image credit: Ni et al.)
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