In 1989 and 1990, a pair of 1-million-year-old skulls belonging to an unknown human species were unearthed in Yunyang District of Hubei province, Central China. A third similar skull was found nearby in 2022, but the mystery didn’t become any less hazy; were they Homo erectus or early Homo sapiens? Might they even be related to the elusive Asian “Dragon Man” lineage?

In a new paper – which is yet to be peer-reviewed – scientists have reconstructed one of the skulls and make the juicy claim that the individual may be close to the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and the Dragon Man lineage.

Dragon Man, scientifically known as Homo longi, is an extinct species of archaic human that's known from a 146,000-year-old skull found in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, which means Black Dragon River. Some have suggested Dragon Man is the same species as the Denisovans – the elusive extinct “sister species” of human that once lived alongside H. sapiens in Eurasia – although its exact place in the Homo family tree is uncertain. 

Curiously, it appears that the Dragon Man might also have an intriguing relationship to the three skulls found in Yunyang, known as the “Yunxian Man”.

To reach this conclusion, the researchers reconstructed the skull of the Yunxian Man, primarily using the better-preserved specimen (Yunxian 2). They then studied the shape of the rebuilt skull to see how it compared to other members of the Homo family.

While the Yunxian skull had a mosaic of features, many aspects of its cranium looked as if it belonged to an early member of the Dragon Man lineage. 

“The reconstructed Yunxian 2 suggest that it is an early member of the Asian ‘Dragon Man’ lineage, which probably includes the Denisovans, and is the sister group of the Homo sapiens lineage. Both the H. sapiens and Dragon Man lineages had deep roots extending beyond the Middle Pleistocene, and the basal position of the Yunxian fossil cranium suggests it represents a population lying close to the last common ancestor of the two lineages,” the study authors write.

At around 940,00 to 1.1 million years old, the Yunxian Man is significantly older than the Dragon Man lineage and H. sapiens. However, its dating does neatly tie in with the theoretical time these two lineages originated around 1.13 million and 930,000 years ago, respectively.

Perhaps, therefore, the Yunxian Man is something of a last common ancestor between our species and the so-called Dragon Man of East Asia, the researchers ponder. 

“It is reasonable to conclude that Yunxian is morphologically and chronologically close to the last common ancestor of the lineages of H. sapiens and Dragon Man,” the study authors explain.

The new paper is posted on the pre-print server bioRxiv.