Breakthrough research identifies ‘Dragon Man’

I recently wrote about the discovery of a new human species following the recovery of DNA from a fragment of bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Those ancient humans, now known as Denisovans, lived in East Asia from at least 300,000 years until 50,000 years ago when they encountered new arrivals in the Far East, we anatomically modern humans. Since then, a few more bones have been identified, but a mystery has remained, that is until last June.

We simply did not know what a Denisovan looked like. In 2018, palaeontologist Qiang Ji met with a man with a long-held family secret. In 1933, his grandfather was working on a bridge over the Long Jian, meaning Dragon River, near Harbin in China. Apparently, he found a human skull, and decided to hide it away, burying it in a well until, on his deathbed, he confessed about it. The skull, nicknamed Dragon Man, aroused Ji’s interest, and he contacted Qiaomei Fu, the Director of the Beijing ancient DNA laboratory in the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology in Beijing. When working with Svante Paabo in Leipzig, she had been on the team that first identified the Denisovans, and she set to work on a thorough analysis of this 140,000-year-old human skull.

She first extracted a sample from the dense petrous bone in the ear region, for this is the most likely region for the preservation of DNA, but none had survived. So, then she noted that a tiny fragment of dental plaque had survived on one of the teeth, and she took a sample weighing only about 0.3 milligrams. Following painstaking laboratory analyses, she was able to identify sufficient human DNA to conclude that Dragon Man was, in fact, a Denisovan. Her breakthrough, published in Nature this June, has received multiple accolades from colleagues in the field of ancient DNA, and the international media.

This Denisovan had a massive shelf of bone above the eyes, and a brain rather larger than modern humans. If you were to encounter him, you would notice at once his big nose and eyes.

There are several more unidentified human skulls from East Asia that, hopefully, will soon find their way into Qiaomei’s laboratory for similar analyses, but for now, at last, we can put a face on the mysterious new Denisovans, for it is worth recalling that they live on in their modern descendants in Melanesia and Australia, since those incoming modern humans met and interbred with them.