Harbin cranium

The Harbin cranium is a nearly complete skull of an archaic human thought to originate from sediments of the Songhua River near Harbin on the Northeast China Plain. It dates to the late Middle Pleistocene, probably no older than 309,000 and no younger than 146,000 years ago. It was described in 2021, and that year it was controversially assigned as the holotype of the new human species Homo longi ("dragon man") named after the Chinese province of Heilongjiang (which means "black dragon river", the Chinese name for the Amur, of which the Songhua is a tributary) where the fossil is thought to have been found. The Harbin cranium was initially hypothesized to belong to the same species as the Denisovans, and subsequent proteomics and mitochondrial DNA analyses confirmed its Denisovan affinities. The Harbin cranium is broadly anatomically similar to other Middle Pleistocene Chinese specimens. Like other archaic humans, the skull is low and long, with massively developed brow ridges, wide eye sockets, and a large mouth. The skull is the longest ever found from any human species. Like modern humans and the much earlier Homo antecessor, the face is rather flat, but with a larger nose. The brain volume was 1,420 cc, within the range of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Taxonomy

Discovery

According to the account of the man who was in possession of the skull before it was given to scientists, in 1933, a local laborer found a nearly complete skull at the riverbank of Songhua River, when he was building the Dongjiang Bridge in Harbin (at the time part of Manchukuo) for the Japanese-aligned Manchukuo National Railway. Recognizing its importance, likely as a result of public interest in anthropology that had recently been generated by the Peking Man in 1929, just four years before, he hid it from the Manchukuo authorities in an abandoned well. In 1945, upon the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that ended the Japanese occupation of the region, he concealed his former employment from the Nationalist and later the Communist authorities. Consequently, he could not report the skull, lest he divulge his ties to the Japanese imperialists in explaining its origin. In 2018, before his death, the third generation of his family learned of the skull, and reclaimed it. Later that year, Chinese paleoanthropologist Ji Qiang persuaded the grandson to donate it to the Hebei GEO University for study, where it has since been stored. Its catalogue number is HBSM2018-000018(A).

However, the veracity of this story has been questioned. In a 2025 article, it was stated that Ji Qiang suspected the story was invented, and that the skull was actually discovered by the grandson himself rather than his grandfather, in which case the man failed to correctly report the find to authorities, though the skull’s origin within the Harbin area has not been contested.

Age Owing to the skull's history, its exact provenance, and thus its stratigraphic context and age, has been difficult to determine. In 2021, Chinese geologist Shao Qingfeng and colleagues performed non-destructive x-ray fluorescence, rare-earth element, and strontium isotope analyses on the skull and various other mammalian fossils unearthed around Dongjiang Bridge, and determined that all the fossils from the vicinity were likely deposited at around the same time, lived in the same region, and probably originate from the Upper Huangshan Formation, dating to 309 to 138 thousand years ago. Direct uranium–thorium dating of various points on the skull yielded a wide range of dates, from 296 to 62 thousand years ago, likely a result of uranium leaching. They statistically determined the most likely minimum age is 146,000 years old, but a more exact value is difficult to determine, given that the exact provenance is unidentifiable. Nonetheless, the skull is well-constrained to the late Middle Pleistocene, roughly contemporaneous with other Chinese specimens from Xiahe, Jinniushan, Dali, and Hualong Cave.

Classification

Earlier Studies and Naming Controversy In two simultaneously published papers, Ji and colleagues declared the Harbin cranium represents a new species they dubbed Homo longi, nicknamed “Dragon Man” (龙人 long·ren), with the species name longi deriving from the Chinese word for dragon, in reference to Heilongjiang Province (whose name literally means "black dragon river", taking its name from the Mandarin name for the Amur, which is also known as "Heilongjiang") where the fossil was reputedly discovered. However, their naming was considered controversial, with the paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres criticizing the authors' species description based on a "fossil with no context". The Harbin cranium is quite similar to the Dali skull, and when the Dali skull was discovered in 1978, it was given a new nomen H. sapiens daliensis by its discoverer Wu Xinzhi who soon thereafter abandoned the name. Consequently, should the Middle Pleistocene Asian humans represent a single unique species, the nomen H. daliensis might take priority. Though they recommended resurrecting H. daliensis, they argued H. longi is sufficiently distinct, and allocated only the Dali and Hualong remains (often allocated to H. heidelbergensis by convention) to H. daliensis; thus, they claim at least two human species inhabited late Middle Pleistocene China. In 2021, one of the authors, Chris Stringer, stated that he would have preferred assigning the Harbin cranium to H. daliensis. However, according to a more recent assessment (including among its authors Xijun Ni, one of the describers of the species H. longi), since Wu wrote only that "it is suggested that Dali cranium probably represents a new subspecies" (p. 538, italics added for emphasis) the name daliensis was never validly published according to International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) rules, being proposed conditionally and published after 1960 (and not formally proposed by subsequent workers in the intervening period), and is therefore unavailable and thus could not compete with longi for priority. In 2025, Chris Stringer commented that the specific name given to the Harbin cranium, H. longi, would be the appropriate specific name for the Denisovans.

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