Homo Juluensis: “Bigheads” Join the Growing List of Proto-Humans
Something new in the field of paleoanthropology: researchers have discovered a new species of human. Well, not human exactly but a close relative of Homo sapiens, which has been named Homo juluensis (Homo “bighead” and you can all stop sniggering).
Neither is it really something new. The species being a part of that mysterious mish-mash of hominins that existing between roughly between 700,000 years and our arrival on the scene some 300,000 years ago.
Neither has it really been discovered, it is more a reclassification of existing evidence. When the researchers put all the skull fragments and other evidence together from this period they saw that something did not add up.
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This research comes from Christopher Bae from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and Xiujie Wu from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their commentary, published in Nature Communications, builds on their work earlier this year and argues for a reclassification of the evidence from this period, known as the Late Quaternary.
It is widely known that there is a problem with this period in our archaic history. Evidence has been found of homo species across the globe, but a consensus has not been reached on how to classify them.
This new commentary proposes that there are four distinct species here. Three: Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and Homo longi, we already know about. But the fourth, coming out of what the researchers pithily describe as “a greater degree of Late Quaternary hominin morphological variability […] present in eastern Asia than previously assumed” is new.
This new large brained hominin, Homo juluensis, is based on finds at two sites in China: Xujiayao and Xuchang. The finds from these sites simply do not match existing species elsewhere. They are not any of the above species, they are something new.
The researchers do not suggest that it stops there, either, noting that the situation is looking more and more like a complex mesh of human species and subspecies, capable of interbreeding and evolving alongside each other. They note finds at another Chinese site, Hualongdong, which doesn’t even work within their new classification, and may well be a fifth Homo species.
All that is clear is that we have a far more complex interplay of Homo species at this period in time than we had allowed for previously. As more finds on the ground are combined with more rigorous reclassifications like this one, we can expect to gain a clearer and more accurate understanding of the melting point out of which we emerged some 300,000 years ago.
Header Image: The four east Asian homo species in the reclassification and their locations. Homo juluensis on the left is new. Source: C Bae and X Wu; Nature Communications.
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