A Brazilian anthropologist has reconstructed the face of the archaic human species Homo longi from a well-preserved skull discovered in northeastern China in the 1930s.
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The portrait of Homo longi. Image credit: Cicero Moraes, doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.24648591.
Homo longi is an extinct species of the genus Homo that lived in Asia during the Middle Pleistocene.
Nicknamed Dragon man, the species was identified from a nearly complete skull dated to 148,000 years ago.
The fossil was discovered in 1933 when a bridge was built over the Songhua River in Harbin City, the Heilongjiang province, China.
Because of its unsystematic recovery and the long time interval, information about the exact site and fossil layer was lost.
The Harbin cranium is massive in size, larger than all other archaic humans. It is also relatively long and low and lacks the globularity of the modern human braincase.
It has larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth.
Its endocranial capacity is estimated as 1,420 ml, falling in the range of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and larger than earlier Homo species.
Also known as the Harbin cranium, the specimen likely represents a male less than 50 years old.
Frontal view of the portrait of Homo longi. Image credit: Cicero Moraes, doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.24648591.
“The Uranium-series dating gave the reliable age of the fossil at 148,000 years ago and its notable dimensions mean that the skull is larger than that of all known archaic humans,” said Cícero Moraes, a researcher with the Ortogonline Treinamento em Desenvolvimento Profissional e Consultoria LTDA.
For the facial approximation of Homo longi, Moraes used computed tomography (CT) scans of the Harbin cranium as well as of skulls of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes.
“Forensic facial reconstruction, or forensic facial approximation, is an auxiliary recognition technique that reconstructs/approximates the face of a skull and is used when there is little information to identify an individual based on the remains,” Moraes explained.
Lateral view of the portrait of Homo longi. Image credit: Cicero Moraes, doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.24648591.
“To make facial approximation possible, it was necessary to reconstruct the jaw and missing teeth,” he added.
“For this purpose, a complete skull of Homo erectus was used, which suffered some structural deformations and adjusted precisely to the region of the teeth.”
“The remaining molar served as a parameter for aligning the other teeth as well as the alveoli of the maxilla.”
“Thanks to a wide range of information available in previous works, it was possible to reconstruct the fossil and face of Homo longi, in addition to addressing some measurements and comparisons in relation to other species,” Moraes concluded.
The results were published online in the journal OrtogOnLineMag.
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Cicero Moraes. 2023. A Aproximação Facial do Homo longi (Harbin, China ~148.000 AP). OrtogOnLineMag 4 (2); doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.24648591
