New, big-headed archaic humans discovered: Who is Homo juluensis? [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Kristina Killgrove published 2 days ago

Researchers have named a new species in the Homo genus. What do we know about these "big headed" people?



image showing various Asian hominin skulls, a map of central Asia, and a timeline of hominins
A diagram shows hominin sites in central Asia along with the fossils discovered there. (Image credit: C. Bae and X. Wu)


Researchers have identified a new species of ancient humans, which they have named Homo juluensis, meaning "big head," based partly on a very large skull found in China.

But what is this new species, and how does it help paleoanthropologists understand hominin variation in the Middle Pleistocene epoch about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago?

After our H. sapiens ancestors evolved roughly 300,000 years ago, they quickly spread out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. For decades, paleoanthropologists have tried to figure out how hominins were evolving prior to the arrival of modern humans, particularly between about 700,000 and 300,000 years ago, when multiple other early humans existed. For instance, anthropologists have found fossils from species like H. heidelbergensis in western Europe and Homo longi in central China, though not everyone agreed each of these represented a separate species. These fossils have also been lumped into catch-all terms like "archaic H. sapiens" and "Middle Pleistocene Homo," and are sometimes informally called "the muddle in the Middle."

Writing about the fossil hominin evidence from China in the journal The Innovation in 2023, Christopher Bae, an anthropologist at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Xiujie Wu, a paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues wrote that continuing to use these catch-all terms has hindered attempts to fully understand the evolutionary relationships among our ancestors.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/new-big-headed-archaic-humans-discovered-who-is-homo-juluensis