호모 롱기 homo longi. 데니소바.14만6천년 전 데니소바인이 아시아 전역에 퍼져 살았다.

Scientists discovered a new kind of human with its pinkie bone. Now we have a skull.

 

Finally, we can put a face on a Denisovan.

 

 

The "Dragon Man" skull was discovered in Harbin, China in 1933 by a local laborer, but remained hidden away until 2018.

 

A new analysis now finds its very likely to be a Denisovan.

 

 

Photograph by Xijun Ni

 

ByTim Vernimmen

June 18, 2025

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 2021, a team of five Chinese researchers stirred up some controversy by suggesting that an unusual skull unearthed in northeastern China belonged to a previously unknown species they thereby officially described as Homo longi, nicknamed “Dragon Man.”

 

(Both names were inspired by the Long Jiang Dragon River region where it was found.)

 

호모 롱기. 별명은 "용 인간, 드래곤 맨"

두개골이 발견된 장소가 롱 지앙 드래곤 강.

 

 

Soon afterwards, the team was contacted by paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, who asked if she could try and get DNA from the skull. 

 

(The Way You Walk Is Tied to a Hole in Your Skull)

 

Back in 2010, she’d been the first to investigate the DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a Siberian cave called Denisova that became world famous because it revealed the existence of a population of hominins not previously known to science, and for which no other fossils existed: the Denisovans. 

 

In two papers published in the journals Science and Cell this week—coauthored with Qiang Ji of Hebei GEO University, an author on the original Homo longi paper—Fu and her team conclude the ‘Dragon Man’ was likely a Denisovan too. Which is big news, as it makes the stunningly complete skull of ‘Dragon Man’, also known as the ‘Harbin skull’, the only Denisovan skull known to science. “After 15 years, we give the Denisovan a face,” she says. “It’s really a special feeling, I feel really happy.”

 

 

Artist John Gurche created this model, based on the "Dragon Man" skull, depicting how Homo longi may have appeared when they lived during the middle Pleistocene, over 146,000 years ago.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen, Nat Geo Image Collection

We now know Denisovans had a wide and low face that combined more primitive features, like a prominent brow ridge, with more modern ones, like delicate cheekbones and a relatively flat lower face that does not jut out like it does in other primates and more ancient hominins. Its massive size also suggests a very large body that perhaps helped protect it from brutal winters in northeastern China.

 

The findings open the door to a better understanding of these ancient hominins and the world they inhabited. “Having a well-preserved skull like this one allows us to compare the Denisovans to many more different specimens found in very different places,” says paleoanthropologist Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the new study. “This means we might be able to compare their body proportions and start thinking about their adaptations to climate, for example.”

 

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(4,000-year-old victim was shot in the back—and survived with an arrow to the rib)

 

How dental plaque helped confirm the findings

After she was granted access to the skull, the first thing Fu did was look for DNA, specifically in the teeth and the petrous bone, a dense part of the skull near the inner ear that is known to be the last spot where DNA might survive in a skull that is estimated to be at least 146,000 years old. When that revealed no genetic material, she turned to a different method: extracting proteins. These are usually more hardy than DNA – and because they are what the genes in the DNA code for, they can also provide genetic clues about the DNA that gave rise to them.  She was able to collect information from 95 different proteins, four of which are known to differ between Denisovans and other hominins. For three of those, the skull had a Denisovan variant (sometimes in combination with another one on the other chromosome).  

 

Inside the hunt for the other humans

Stunning discoveries and fresh breakthroughs in DNA analysis are changing our understanding of our own evolution and offering a new picture of the Neanderthals and Denisovans that our ancestors met across Europe and Asia.

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Yet Fu still wanted to find DNA to confirm if the skull belonged to a Denisovan. And so she looked in the dental plaque on its single remaining tooth. It was a long shot: while plaque is a very hardy material, researchers more typically find bacterial DNA in it. It’s rarer to find the DNA of the owner of the teeth.  Against expectations, she did find a tiny amount of DNA there that was human and looked sufficiently old to have belonged to the skull itself, and not one of the people who have handled it since. 

 

“They may have actually recovered many DNA fragments from me because I studied and handled the specimens so many times,” says paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni, who is based at the same institute and was one of the coauthors of the paper proposing Homo longi as a new species, but was not a coauthor on the current paper. (He is not convinced that the protein analysis is sufficiently specific, nor does he believe the degraded DNA is enough to identify the specimen as Denisovan.)

 

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Fu acknowledges in the paper “a substantial proportion” of the DNA she found was clearly the result of contamination. But using the established protocols to select only the DNA that is indeed ancient, she found that the tiny amount of DNA that remains, like the proteins, confidently identifies the skull as Denisovan “It contains 27 gene variants only found in the seven known Denisovan individuals,” says Fu. “None of these can arise from modern human contamination.” 

 

“The data are quite convincing,” says paleobiologist Frido Welker of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who specializes in the analysis of ancient proteins, but wasn’t involved in this study. “The Harbin cranium appears to be a Denisovan.”

 

Other researchers are convinced as well.  Since the description of [the Harbin skull] I was hopeful that we finally had a face for the Denisovans, and these papers prove it,” says Viola  who has conducted excavations in Denisova cave. “It’s great that two different methods gave us the same result, this makes me much more confident that this is real.” 

 

Denisovans inhabited an even wider range than we thought

These results provoke an unsettled question: Since Denisovans have never been formally described as a species, but Homo longi has, should we now refer to Denisovans as Homo longi? 

 

For some, the answer is clearly yes. “Assuming the author’s claim is true, then Denisovans are a population of Homo longi, just as New Yorkers and Beijingers are both Homo sapiens” says Ni. Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who has been collaborating with Ni and others on a new analysis of Chinese hominin fossils, agrees that even though “it is increasingly likely that Harbin is the most complete fossil of a Denisovan found so far, Homo longi is the appropriate species name for this group.”

 

But other researchers don’t think it’s useful to assign separate species names to hominins from this period. “We ourselves do not use species names for Neandertals or Denisovans,” says paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthrology, who leads the lab where Fu first analyzed the Denisovan DNA. “We do not find it helpful as these are closely related groups that have been shown to mix and have fertile offspring, with each other and with our own direct ancestors. But if a species name is needed, we would simply call them all Homo sapiens.” 

 

(The best evidence yet that Roman gladiators fought lions: a bite mark)

 

Naming discussions aside, a very exciting discovery remains: a kind of human we once only knew from a pinky bone dug up from a cave now has a face. And we now know this kind of human did not just live in Siberia where the first pinkie bone was found, but across much of East-Asia. 

 

Confidently identifying this fossil will also help researchers make sense of the many other mysterious fossils found across East-Asia, and will encourage them to try and get molecular evidence from those as well. This may also shed new light on how and when Denisovans interbred with our own ancestors — which could help explain why, long after the last Denisovan like "Dragon Man" died out, traces of their DNA still survive in some people today.

 

 

 

[사이테크+] "하얼빈에서 발견된 고대 인류 두개골 주인공은 데니소바인"
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송고2025-06-19 08:36

송고 2025년06월19일 08시36분

세 줄 요약
이주영
이주영기자

구독
中 연구팀 "두개골 치석 속 DNA 분석…데니소바인 고유 유전자 변이 확인"
(서울=연합뉴스) 이주영 기자 = 2021년 신종 고대 인류로 추정된다는 연구 결과로 세계적인 관심을 끈 14만6천년 전 인류 화석 하얼빈 두개골(Harbin cranium)이 데니소바인 계통에 속하는 것으로 밝혀졌다.

이미지 확대새로운 고대 인류 '호모 롱기'로 분류됐던 하얼빈 두개골
새로운 고대 인류 '호모 롱기'로 분류됐던 하얼빈 두개골
[AFP=연합뉴스 자료사진. 재판매 및 DB 금지]

중국과학원 고척추동물 및 고인류학 연구소 푸차오메이 박사와 허베이지질대학 지창 박사 공동 연구팀은 19일 과학 저널 사이언스(Science)와 셀(Cell)에서 하얼빈 두개골 치아의 치석에서 회수한 미토콘드리아 DNA(mtDNA)를 분석, 데니소바인 고유의 유전자 변이 3개를 확인했다고 밝혔다.

연구팀은 이 결과는 하얼빈 두개골이 데니소바인의 초기 mtDNA 계통에 속한다는 것을 확인해 준다며 이는 14만6천년 전인 중기 플라이스토세에 데니소바인이 시베리아에서 중국 동북부까지 광범위하게 분포했음을 시사한다고 말했다.

이어 이 연구는 하얼빈 두개골을 둘러싼 분류 논쟁을 해결할 뿐 아니라 달리와 진니우산 화석 같은 동아시아의 다른 고대 인류 화석이 데니소바인 계통에 속할 가능성을 식별하는 데 중요한 참조 자료가 될 것이라고 덧붙였다.

데니소바인은 15년 전 시베리아 동굴에서 처음 발견된 후 여러 지역의 화석에서 DNA와 단백질 분석을 통해 확인됐지만 발견된 화석이 대부분 불완전하고 단편적이어서 '데니소바인이 어떻게 생겼을까?'라는 질문이 꾸준히 제기돼 왔다.

이미지 확대하얼빈 두개골과 10만년 이상 된 인류 화석 DNA가 회수된 지역들
하얼빈 두개골과 10만년 이상 된 인류 화석 DNA가 회수된 지역들
(A) 중국 동북부 헤이룽장성 하얼빈에서 발굴된 하얼빈 두개골(Harbin cranium). (B) 10만 년 이상 된 인류 화석에서 DNA가 회수된 유적들의 위치와 연대 지도. 하얼빈(약 14만6천년 전). 바이시야 카르스트 동굴(약 10만년 전). 데니소바 동굴(12만3천~19만4천년 전, 18만7천~21만7천년 전, 10만6천~13만6천년 전). 스클라디나 동굴(약 12만년 전). 호렌슈타인-슈타델 동굴(약 12만4천년 전). 스클라디나 동굴(약 12만 년 전). 시마 데 로스 우에소스 동굴(약 40만년 전). ●는 데니소바인 또는 데니소바 유사 인류 미토콘드리아 DNA(mtDNA). ■는 네안데르탈인 mtDNA. [Cell / Qiaomei Fu et al. 제공. 재판매 및 DB 금지]

연구팀은 이 연구에서 이전까지 '호모 롱기'(Homo Longi.Dragon Man)라는 새로운 고대 인류로 알려졌던 하얼빈 두개골의 치아에서 치석을 회수하고, 이를 새로 개발한 고단백체 분석 기술과 혁신적인 고대 DNA 실험 방법으로 조사했다.

하얼빈 두개골은 1933년 일본 지배 당시 헤이룽장성 하얼빈에서 쑹화강 다리 건설에 투입된 한 농부가 발견한 것으로 알려져 있다. 농부는 두개골을 가보로 삼기 위해 버려진 우물에 숨겼다가 임종을 앞둔 2018년 손자에게 두개골에 대해 알렸고 손자는 두개골을 찾아 인근 대학에 기증했다.

이 두개골을 연구한 중국 연구진은 2021년 50대 후반 남성으로 추정되는 이 두개골의 해부학적 특징 600여개를 조사한 결과 네안데르탈인이나 데니소바인보다 호모 사피엔스에 더 가깝다며 신종 고대 인류 '호모 롱기'로 명명했다.

 

 

이미지 확대

 

 

하얼빈 두개골 치아에서 치석을 채취한 위치

 

 

연구팀은 하얼빈 두개골 치아에서 채취한 치석 0.3㎎을 분석, 미토콘드리아 DNA(mtDNA)를 회수하고 염기서열을 분석했다.

 

 [Cell / Qiaomei Fu et al. 제공. 재판매 및 DB 금지]

연구팀은 하얼빈 두개골 치아 부분에서 치석 0.3㎎을 채취, 고단백체 분석과 고대 DNA 실험을 통해 이 사람의 미토콘드리아 DNA를 회수하는 데 성공했다.

이어 새로 구축된 고단백체 시스템을 사용해 두개골 질량 분석 데이터를 조사해 30만8천여개의 펩티드 조각 정보를 찾아내고 2만개 이상의 펩티드를 식별했으며, 이 사람의 단백질 95개를 확인했다.

또 인류 등 사람과(Hominidae) 종의 고유한 단일 아미노산 다형성(SAPs) 122개를 발견, 하얼빈 두개골이 호모 속(Homo genus)에 속한다는 것을 확인했다.

특히 하얼빈 두개골의 DNA에는 데니소바인에게만 있는 유전자 변이 3개가 있는 것으로 밝혀졌으며, 두개골 주인공이 시베리아 데니소바 동굴에서 발굴된 화석(Denisova 3)과 계통 발생학적으로 연결된다는 사실도 확인됐다.

연구팀은 이는 거의 완전한 형태로 발견된 하얼빈 두개골이 시베리아 데니소바인 개체군과 연결돼 있음을 처음으로 밝혀낸 것이라며 이는 14만6천년 전 데니소바인이 아시아 전역에 걸쳐 넓게 분포했음을 시사한다고 설명했다.

이어 "이 연구는 고대 인류 화석에 남아 있는 치아 치석 속에 고대 인류 DNA가 보존될 수 있음을 보여준다"며 "이는 중기 플라이스토세 인류의 유전적 연구에 새로운 창을 열어 줄 수 있을 것"이라고 덧붙였다.

◆ 출처 : Science, Qiang Ji et al., 'The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual', https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adu9677

Cell, Qiaomei Fu et al., 'Denisovan Mitochondrial DNA from Dental Calculus of the > 146,000-year-old Harbin Cranium', https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00627-0

scitech@yna.co.kr

 

 

 

https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20250619031800017

[사이테크+] "하얼빈에서 발견된 고대 인류 두개골 주인공은 데니소바인" | 연합뉴스