Thus he quotes John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, as agreeing that the Harbin skull is
a Denisovan, but that they, modern humans, and Neanderthals, “are all Homo sapiens.”
This reflects the views of Hawks, a well-known “multiregionalist,”
that modern humans evolved separately in different parts of the world
but that interbreeding led to all these family trees coalescing into one
species.
On the other hand, Zimmer quotes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, as saying “Homo longi
is the appropriate species name for this group.” Stringer is closely
associated with the anti-multiregionalist position sometimes referred to
as the Out of Africa hypothesis.
In recent years, many scientists have come to think that both views are
correct in some ways, especially as evidence for interbreeding between
different hominid groups has mounted.
I’ve known Chris Stringer for more than a quarter of a century, so I asked him to comment on all of this. ... "most of the large-brained humans from the last 800,000 years can
be sorted into one or other of the following groups/species: Asian
erectus, heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, sapiens and Denisovans/longi.
There is certainly much more to come from extractions of ancient DNA and
proteomes from the human fossils."
https://theconversation.com/morocco-ancient-fossils-shed-light-on-a-key-period-in-human-evolution-275099
The Casablanca fossils come from a time [773,000 years ago] when Homo erectus spread out of Africa. It was also a time when older groups of hominins like the Australopithecus and Paranthropus died out.
In terms of shapes and features, the fossils show a mix of archaic traits typical of Homo erectus and more advanced traits closely related to Homo sapiens.
They also fill an important gap in the African fossil record.
Palaeogenetic data suggest a split between the African lineage to Homo sapiens and the Eurasian lineages that later produced the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
The unique combination of primitive and more evolved features
suggests that these individuals were in a population that lived close in
time to this split.
Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") is located within the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological complex, situated in the province of Burgos, northern Spain. The site is a deep vertical shaft (approx. 13-14 meters) inside the Cueva Mayor cave system, known for holding the largest collection of 430,000-year-old human fossils...
the fossils of Homo antecessor unearthed at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Spain were the only ones to show Homo sapiens-like traits. The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés [Morocco] offer a new perspective.
They open up the possibility of an evolutionary link with the oldest known Homo sapiens
fossils – those from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dated to around 315,000
years ago. These discoveries help clarify the emergence of the Homo sapiens lineage while reinforcing the idea that its deep roots are African.
Originally classified in 1935, H. helmei
has since been re-visited by numerous anthropologists, most of whom now
believe that the Florisbad skull actually belonged to a very early Homo sapiens
individual. However, despite being the same species as us, the
morphology of this prehistoric fossil is pretty different from modern
human skulls,
Homo helmei
(often associated with the ~259,000-year-old Florisbad Skull from South Africa) is an ambiguous, sometimes debated, archaic human classification often considered a late form of Homo heidelbergensis or a very early ancestor of Homo sapiens.
It typically bridges the morphological gap between middle Pleistocene
hominins and modern humans, characterized by a larger, modern-like
braincase... Stringer’s analysis places the 146,000-year-old Harbin cranium (and
affiliated 1-million-year-old Yunxian 2 skull) as a sister group to Homo sapiens, suggesting the common ancestor of our lineage lived in Asia...
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/september/origin-of-our-species-lineage-pushed-back-by-half-a-million-years.html
“Our analysis suggests that all large-brained humans from the last
800,000 years or so can probably be put into one of five groups,”
explains Chris. These are the groups of Asian Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, the Homo longi group which likely contains the Denisovans, and of our own species Homo sapiens.
“What’s revolutionary about our analysis is that it suggests all
these five lineages trace their ancestry back more than a million years,
which is much older than almost everyone has said, including me. And
there are a couple of aspects that suggest that it could be an even more
ancient divergence.”
What they arrived at was something [a skull 1 million years old in China] which looked less like Homo erectus and more like those of a fossil known as Dragon Man.
The Dragon Man fossil, also unearthed in China, was described by Chris and his colleagues in 2021 and has been named as the species Homo longi.
“Our analysis suggests that the Yunxian skulls are actually an early
member of the same group as Dragon Man,” says Chris. “And because Dragon
Man increasingly now looks like it’s a Denisovan, there’s a lot of
evidence pointing to the fact that the Yunxian fossils also belong to
the Denisovan group.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
Feng et al. reconstructed the 1-million-year-old Yunxian 2
cranium using an approach that allowed for removal of much of the
compression and distortion naturally present in the fossil. In doing so,
they found that the cranium contained both primitive and derived traits
and concluded that it is representative of the H. longi clade, which is sister to H. sapiens and likely contained the Denisovans.
the Denisovan lineage of humans had already split off from other humans
by a million years ago. On the surface this might appear like a fairly
minor discovery, but its ramifications could be huge....Therefore, if the Denisovans split off over a million years ago, it means that ours did too and that the Homo sapiens lineage is equally as ancient....
there must be some early members of the lineages of H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens
that we haven’t found yet, or which we have found but we haven’t
recognised yet. There must be some million-year-old proto-sapiens,
proto-neanderthals and proto-heidelbergensis out there.”
It also opens the door for the potential that our own lineage first
emerged somewhere in Eurasia, before populations migrated into Africa
where Homo sapiens then evolved. Chris, however, is quick to
point out that this conclusion still needs checking against
million-year-old human fossils unearthed on the African continent that
were unavailable for the current study.
@JohannDrittenthalerjohann
9 minutes ago