John Hawks: "Julurens: a new cousin for Denisovans and Neanderthals"
"A new study suggests that the Middle Pleistocene record in China includes more groups than have previously been recognized."
U. of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks takes seriously recent Chinese papers arguing for the existence of a fairly recent type of ancient human along with the Neanderthals and Denisovans: the Julurens or Big Heads.
A new article from Xiujie Wu and Christopher Bae presents a new look at some fossils of the later Middle Pleistocene. They focus on fossil samples from Xujiayao in north China and Xuchang in central China. These fossils, which date to between 220,000 and 100,000 years ago, contrast with the so-called “Dragon Man” skull from Harbin and other similar remains. Wu and Bae suggest that the Xujiayao and Xuchang fossils may be something different and call them the Julurens—a name that means “big heads”.
But the evidence, so far, is less of a slam dunk than with the spectacular find of the Denisovans a decade and a half ago: a Denisovan tooth was first discovered in the Denisova cave in Central Asia in 2008. And then in 2010 David Reich and company sequenced its DNA in 2010, showing that, as with Neanderthals, Denisovans didn’t go utterly extinct. Instead, some of their DNA survived in some (but not all) modern humans: those from the east side of the Old World, especially Western Pacific islanders.
At present, nobody has come up with Big Head ancient DNA, so the evidence for their existence is from 20th Century-style paleontology involving measuring bones with calipers and the like.
… The skull was big: With an estimated volume of 1700 ml, it is the largest known for any hominin of its time.
I see estimates of modern human cranial capacity in the 1350 to 1400 ml range, so the Big Heads would have had notably big heads.
While the brain was larger than those of most recent people, the skull was shaped very differently from them. It was markedly wider at its base, and limited in skull height. …
One small group of fossils did impress Wu and Bae as possibly similar to the Xujiayao teeth and mandible fragment: the fossils identified as Denisovans. …
Are the Big Heads a different species? What is a species anyways? If you use Ernst Mayr’s not unreasonable but not conclusive interbreeding rule, how do you conclusively determine if organisms that lived thousands of years apart were interfertile?
These kind of lumper-splitter questions bedevil all sciences, but we live in an era in which intellectuals are ferociously skeptical about the existence of race among living humans. You might think that would lead to to skepticism about the existence of species among ancient humans, but nobody other than professional specialists like Hawks much worries about it.
Wu and Bae are not proposing that this group was isolated or different at a species level from the others. They instead consider that the pattern of morphology may result from genetic exchanges both among groups within China and with other regions further afield. …
A lot of ancient human fossils have been dug up in China since Peking Man a century ago. The Chinese have lagged less on the empirical side of paleoanthropology than on the theoretical / public relations side. How do you group a bunch of fossils? Western models have been more popular than Chinese models at this.
More generally, Europeans have been out ahead of the rest of the world at theorizing (and at publicizing their theories) for a number of centuries. For example, China is presently ruled by its Communist Party, a name popularized by European master theoreticians / rhetoricians Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848. Europeans, for good and bad, have just been better at coming up with interesting theories.
But it strikes me as likely that the now prosperous and highly educated Chinese will be closing the Theory Gap (if only slowly). Chinese fossils in Chinese museums seem like a reasonable subject for the beginning of the narrowing of the Theory Gap.
Since the discovery of the Denisova 3 genome within its tiny finger bone, the media in Europe and the U.S. have framed the study of this group as a whodunnit. Which fossil will finally give a face to the Denisovans? But I've had some interesting conversations with colleagues in China who put this notion of mystery on its head. The Denisovan name, from their point of view, exists only because of a temporary absence of correlation between DNA and the fossil record. For them, the question is not which fossils will give a face to the Denisovans, but instead which already-known fossil will give its name to the genomes. It may well be Homo longi.
Homo longi or Dragon Man was a skull from about 150,000 years ago dug up in 1933 but not studied by scientists until 2018.
I think the record is more expansive than most specialists have been assuming. The genetic data from different individuals within Denisova Cave shows diversity almost as deep as between the most different living humans. Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a contrast to recent humans, not as a description of their populations across space and time.
So I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to a particular group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups. The Xujiayao sample represents people who lived long before Denisova 3, who made very different artifacts and experienced different ecological conditions. I think it's very plausible that the groups were relatives but I suspect they were as different as the Altai Neanderthals and Thorin lineage. A different name within a broader grouping seems helpful, even if the Denisova fossils turn out to be close relatives of Xujiayao. A different name will be even more valuable if, as Wu and Bae suggest, the Xujiayao and Xuchang fossils do indeed reflect a mixture of ancestry from Neanderthals, earlier Chinese Middle Pleistocene people, and possibly others.
Julurens. You may find the name grows on you.
impressive that they have already generated reconstructions of what Julurens might have looked like, tho
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3091777/mediaviewer/rm3073318144/?ref_=nm_md_4
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5218422/mediaviewer/rm2687442176?ft0=name&fv0=nm3091777&ft1=image_type&fv1=still_frame&ref_=tt_ch