GIANT SKULL

A massive 146,000 year old human skull, giant size you may say, found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China’s northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. It was hidden away at the time and only retrieved in 2018 when the person who put it there revealed its whereabouts to his grandson just before his death. The skull - which is 23cm long and more than 15cm wide - is much larger than that of modern humans and incredibly has a brain capacity in the range of 1,420ml, which is comparable with the size of a modern human brain. It has a thick brow ridge with a face that has large square eye sockets. A new study shows the skull belonged to a male, approximately 50 years old, who it is said "would have been an impressive physical specimen. His wide, bulbous nose allowed him to breathe huge volumes of air, indicating a high-energy lifestyle, while sheer size would have helped him withstand the brutally cold winters in the region." "Homo longi is heavily built, very robust,” said Prof Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at Hebei. “It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans.” Wheel back one .... "It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans.” So we are saying that this individual was of extreme size. Everything - the times frame, location and description of the individual -supports the suspicion that this is a Denisovan skull, who all the indications are were of extreme size and inhabited central, eastern and southern Asia from around 400,000 years ago through to around 50,000 down to 45,000 years ago. In particular we know that the Denisovans were at places like the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia as well as the Tibetan Plateau in an area of northwestern China. As the article today in The Guardian newspaper states: "one possibility is that the Harbin skull is Denisovan, a mysterious group of extinct humans known largely from DNA and bone fragments recovered from Siberia. “Certainly this specimen could be Denisovan but we have to be cautious. What we need is much more complete skeletal material of the Denisovans alongside DNA,” said Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum London. Despite the obvious possibility that the skull is the first ever Denisovan skull, the Chinese team heading the study to investigate it have concluded it belongs to an entirely human species and have called it Homo longi, meaning "Dragon man." they compared it against 95 other known skulls of archaic humans and concluded it was a branch off from the Neanderthals. This idea that it is a new species has not impressed western paleo-anthropologists like Chris Stringer or Prof John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who thinks it possible the skull could well be that of a Denisovan. I obviously want to think more on this incredible discovery, and might even do a video on it. The fact that it was found in the same part of the world as Lake Baikal and Mongolia where archaeologists believe our own ancestors first came into contact with Denisovans even further hints at the link between this massive skull and Denisovans. What is more the skull still contains one huge molar that I suspect could well match the giant teeth of Denisovans found in the Denisova Cave in the Xiahe jawbone found in 1980 on the Tibetan Plateau also now identified as Denisovan. There is also surely links between this skull and the giant Penghu jawbone found off the coast of Taiwan, which also has teeth similar to those of Siberian Denisovans. This too is thought to be Denisovan.