Is this not an interesting coincidence that the Communist Party of China just celebrates its 100th anniversary, while three research papers come out in June 2021 to claim that "Dragon Man" is closer to H. sapiens than the "Neanderthal"?
Is the CPC making some supremacy claims for ancient hominids who lived in the area what is now China?
I am skeptical to attach so much importance to a single skull! However, this seems to be quite common in paleoanthropology!
"... The single cranium used to describe the species—the largest of any hominin and remarkably well-preserved for being at least 146,000 years old—has a murky history that some experts say limits what conclusions can be drawn about it, but it does add to anthropologists’ understanding of human evolution in Asia during the latter half of the middle Pleistocene, an important period in human expansion.
“We got such an amazing, complete cranium, and it provided very important information for us to understand the evolution of Homo as a genus,” says Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a coauthor of all three studies. “Previously, we thought the Neanderthal is the sister lineage of H. sapiens, but now we find that Homo longi and other members of this lineage are actually closer to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals are.” ...
The third study is a first stab at working H. longi into human evolution. The authors created a new phylogenetic tree for the Homo lineage using 95 fossils and more than 600 measurements and morphological traits and modeled the presumed biogeographic migrations of different groups during the Pleistocene. The resulting tree confirmed that the Harbin cranium, along with other fossils from the Harbin group, constitute a monophyletic sister lineage with H. sapiens, pushing the time when modern humans and Neanderthals last shared a common ancestor back 400,000 more years and displacing them as our most recent ancestor. ..."
The third study is a first stab at working H. longi into human evolution. The authors created a new phylogenetic tree for the Homo lineage using 95 fossils and more than 600 measurements and morphological traits and modeled the presumed biogeographic migrations of different groups during the Pleistocene. The resulting tree confirmed that the Harbin cranium, along with other fossils from the Harbin group, constitute a monophyletic sister lineage with H. sapiens, pushing the time when modern humans and Neanderthals last shared a common ancestor back 400,000 more years and displacing them as our most recent ancestor. ..."
