Scientists Say Skeletons Show Ancient Humans With Huge Heads

"I think the record is more expansive than most specialists have been assuming."

Big Brain Time

Scientists are suggesting that a "large-headed" group of extinct humans once lived during the same time as homo sapiens — that's us, of course — hundreds of millennia ago in what's now modern-day China.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications last month, University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Christopher Bae and Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Xiujie Wu are proposing the existence of a new group of humans called the Juluren, which roughly translates to "big heads."

Many of the proposed group's attributes, based on bone fragments collected across modern-day China, are currently ascribed to Denisovans, a subspecies of archaic humans who lived across Asia from 285,000 to 25,000 years ago.

However, Wu and Bae argue that some of these fossils' features should be assigned to their own species.

"Collectively, these fossils represent a new form of large-brained hominin," they wrote in the study.

Head Hunters

The species, which would've lived from around 300,000 years ago until about 50,000 years ago across eastern Asia, likely hunted wild horses in small groups. They also appeared to make stone tools and used animal hides for survival.

Wu and Bae are hoping to fill in the gaps in our current knowledge of extinct human subspecies by refining how we refer to these disparate groups today.

"This study clarifies a hominin fossil record that has tended to include anything that cannot easily be assigned to Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens," Bae said in a statement. "Although we started this project several years ago, we did not expect being able to propose a new hominin (human ancestor) species and then to be able to organize the hominin fossils from Asia into different groups."

All told, the research suggests a far more complex and nuanced picture of the dispersal of human groups over hundreds of thousands of years.

"I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to a particular group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups," paleoanthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the research, wrote in a blog post about the study.

"I think the record is more expansive than most specialists have been assuming," he added. "Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a contrast to recent humans, not as a description of their populations across space and time."

Wu and Bae would tend to agree.

"If anything, the eastern Asian record is prompting us to recognize just how complex human evolution is more generally and really forcing us to revise and rethink our interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record," they wrote in their study.

More on homo sapiens: Scientists Find Structure From Before Homo Sapiens Existed