For decades, archaeologists have been digging up enigmatic hominin fossils across East and Southeast Asia. They clearly didn’t belong to our own species, Homo sapiens, nor did they fit neatly into the other well-established species from that era, roughly 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. But if they weren’t members of Homo neanderthalensis or Homo erectus, what were they?
Christopher Bae, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Hawaii, decided an entirely new classification was in order. Together with Xiujie Wu, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he proposed in a Nature Communications paper last November that several of those taxonomically unhoused fossils be united under the species name Homo juluensis.
Naming H. juluensis
In Chinese, “julu” literally means “big head,” and the name fits: Whereas our average cranial capacity is about 1,350 cubic centimeters, a juluensis skull measures 1,700.
“It’s kinda like Homo erectus,” Bae says, “but pumped up on steroids.”
Technically, the suffix “ensis” means “from” in Latin — neanderthalensis, for example, is named for the Neander Valley in Germany. But juluensis flowed nicely, so Bae and Wu went with it even though the term doesn’t refer to a geographic location.
Within H. juluensis, the most familiar faces are the Denisovans (which, unlike their close European cousins, the Neanderthals, are not formally recognized as a species). Researchers first found this ancient group of hominins in Siberia’s Denisova Cave, but other remains have since turned up in far-flung corners of the Asian continent. A jawbone from a Tibetan cave was identified as Denisovan in 2019, and another jawbone found offshore from Taiwan joined the club in April.
Under the new proposed arrangement, those specimens — along with a molar from a cave in Laos and assorted fossils from two archaeological sites in China, Xujiayao and Xuchang — would all share the name H. juluensis. The fragments all point to an impressively robust anatomy, and Bae argues the similarities justify grouping them together. But, as he predicted, not everyone approves.
“We knew from the get-go that people were going to debate this pretty hard,” he says.
Read More: 146,000-Year-Old Dragon Man Skull Confirmed as Denisovan Through Dental DNA
Two Different Groupings
Indeed, Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, sees things differently. In 2021, he and his colleagues suggested their own way of sorting out the chaos in East Asia: Homo longi. Named for the famous “Dragon Man” skull found near the Chinese city of Harbin, this proposed species also casts a wide net around the regional fossil record. Stringer would go on to suggest that with the exception of the Xuchang fossils, H. juluensis and its members would be associated with Homo longi.
Ultimately, Bae acknowledges, these classifications are somewhat arbitrary.
“There are definitely grounds for different groupings,” he says.
But whether you choose to call them different species, as opposed to merely different populations of a single species, “it’s really a matter of opinion.” The anatomical traits that guide these decisions vary so much within species that it isn’t always obvious where to draw the line between them.
More to Learn about H. juluensis
In that regard, at least, Bae and Stringer agree. Time — and number of citations in future academic papers — will tell which scheme of fossil organization wins more adherents.
In the world of paleoanthropology, there are splitters, who emphasize the differences between fossils, and lumpers, who emphasize the similarities. Bae counts himself among the lumpers.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t want to force everything into H. juluensis. At that point, we’d just be giving a new name to the old term “archaic Homo sapiens,” which served for decades as a wastebasket taxon: a receptacle for all the fossils that don’t fit anywhere else. So plenty of mysteries remain. It’s still unclear where in the family tree to place southern China’s Maba Man, for example, or central India’s Narmada Man.
There’s also much left to learn about the behavior of H. juluensis. That said, we can piece together parts of the puzzle — alongside the fossils at the Xujiayao site, archaeologists found thousands of stone artifacts and animal bones, mostly from horses and gazelles. If they were able to routinely kill such animals, Bae says, “juluensis was probably as good if not better than Neanderthal at hunting.”
Read More: Homo Longi: Extinct Human Species That May Replace Neanderthals As Our Closest Relatives Found in China
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Cody Cottier is a contributing writer at Discover who loves exploring big questions about the universe and our home planet, the nature of consciousness, the ethical implications of science and more. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University.
