But now we turn to our hominid ancestors, as we're discovering ever more species all over our region. The bone man who knows them best is the renowned Dr Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
The amount of work that you've done, Chris, over the years is so extensive, it's almost impossible to pick a reasonable 20 or 30 examples, but it's been fascinating to look at the ways in which, for instance, you've connected with other parts of the world. And let's start with Dragon Man and your place in the story.
Chris Stringer: Yes, it's an amazing story, and we haven't really got to the bottom of the early history of this fossil, but for those who don't already know, this fossil from China, the best-preserved ancient human fossil from China, it's been named a new species of human, Homo longi, Dragon Man. And I was asked to collaborate with Chinese colleagues, about five years ago now, on describing it.
It had an interesting early history. Allegedly it was actually discovered in 1933 in Harbin in northeast China. And at that time the Japanese were occupying the region, and they commandeered a group of Chinese people, labourers, to work on building a railway bridge across the river at Harbin. And one of these guys was digging in the river deposits and he found this fantastic fossil skull. And it was only a few years after Peking Man had been found, so he knew it could be important. He didn't want the Japanese to get their hands on it, so he put it in his rucksack and took it home. And he wrapped it up and put it down a disused well, which is apparently what you do in China if you want to get rid of some treasures, hide them, you put them down a disused well. So he did that.
Okay, fast-forward now to about ten years ago, and this guy supposedly is on his death bed, and he hasn't told anyone about this skull up to then because he's ashamed of having worked for the Japanese so he's kept quiet about the whole thing. He tells his grandchildren to look down the well, and sure enough they find this beautiful skull, still well preserved.
And I was involved in studying it. It was announced at a press conference in 2018 but suggesting it might be Homo heidelbergensis, this early human species. So we began working on it a bit later, and it soon became clear to me and some of my Chinese workers that it was not a Neanderthal. It wasn't heidelbergensis. It certainly wasn't Homo sapiens, it had a great big brow ridge, and it's huge in size. It's the biggest fossil skull I've ever seen. And it was something different.
Our analyses suggested it represented a third main lineage of humans in the late Pleistocene. So we had been evolving in Africa as Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals had been evolving in Europe and Asia. And this group, Homo longi, Dragon Man, whatever we want to call it, had been evolving in East Asia. So a number of other Chinese fossils also grouped with the Dragon Man skull.
Robyn Williams: Where did the name come from, 'Dragon Man'?
Chris Stringer: From the Dragon River, and of course dragons are very special for the Chinese, so it was a great name. So that, of course, brings up another interesting question, because we do know there is another lineage of humans in the Far East called Denisovans. So the Denisovans are known mainly from DNA from the original cave in Russian Siberia. And so Russian archaeologists have been digging there for over 50 years and had found fragmentary fossils. Nobody really knew what they were. There were some big teeth. But when Svante Paabo and colleagues got their hands on these specimens and extracted DNA, they discovered, to everyone's amazement, that it was a new kind of human, not a Sapiens, not a Neanderthal, but something else, which became known as Denisovans.
Robyn Williams: Svante, by the way, got the Nobel Prize for his work.
Chris Stringer: He did, deservedly so, yes, that's right. So this lineage of Denisovans we know has been in that region for at least a couple of hundred thousand years, and there's a jaw bone from the Tibetan plateau of China, which, based on its fossil proteins, seems to be a Denisovan. And there's now more bits and pieces that are being put into that group. And so the big question is, well, we've got a separate lineage based on DNA, Denisovans. We've got a separate lineage based on fossils, Dragon Man and his group. Aren't they the same thing? Well, we can now say with a high degree of certainty they are. So this is that third lineage.
So we've got whole genomes from this lineage, and we've got some beautiful fossils. And it does seem to be a third lineage of humans, and it interbred with Homo sapiens, just as the Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens. And interestingly there was even interbreeding down in Australasia, because people today in the Philippines, Australia, Papua New Guinea, have quite a high level of interbreeding showing in their DNA from Denisovans. So they've got Neanderthal DNA, as Europeans have got and Chinese have got, but they've also got quite a lot of Denisovan DNA.
So the Denisovans, we assume, were living down there as well, even though we haven't got a single fossil from down there, they must have been living on some of those regions, maybe Sulawesi, Sumatra. Some people reckon they were even moving towards New Guinea, but we haven't found the fossils yet, so that's another mystery. But the Dragon Man group must have been widespread, because they're right up in northeast China, where even today it's extremely cold winters, you know, -16 degrees in Harbin today. So these people were coping with really cold conditions. But apparently they were also down in sub-tropical conditions in Southeast Asia. So a whole lot to learn about them.
Robyn Williams: You mentioned the Neanderthals before. One lineage of Neanderthals, or was there a bit of a cousin somewhere?
Chris Stringer: Well, the Neanderthals were varied, but not as varied, it seems, as the Denisovans must have been. So we reckon there were at least three different groups of Denisovans in that region, because the DNA that you find at a small level in, say, Tibet or China from Denisovans seems to be different from what you find in the Philippines people and different to what you find in Australia and New Guinea. So there were at least three lots of Denisovans, and they diversified over probably 300,000 or 400,000 years.
For the Neanderthals, they're much more unified in their DNA. We've got ancient Neanderthal DNA from Atapuerca at about 400,000 years, but when we get to the later ones, they're all quite closely related, much more so than the Denisovans seem to be. And it might just be that we haven't found more distinctive Neanderthals. And interestingly, a paper is coming out this week that does show a distinct Neanderthal in Europe about 50,000 years ago, from a site called Grotte Mandrin in the…
Robyn Williams: That's quite recent.
Chris Stringer: Yeah, 50,000, we've now moved on a long way. So the Neanderthals at 50,000 had unsuspected diversity in Europe, not as much as the Denisovans, we're still talking closely related, but a divergence, maybe 100,000 years ago, of a Neanderthal lineage that then somehow remains separate somewhere in Europe and survived until at least 50,000 years ago. And there's a fossil from Grotte Mandrin, they've nicknamed him Thorin, a male individual, his skeleton has been discovered at this cave, and his DNA shows he's distinct from the other known late Neanderthals. So somehow…and we know that Homo sapiens was very varied across Africa, and even in Europe there was unsuspected diversity, although on a smaller scale, in the Neanderthals, and they were making distinctive stone tools. So it looks like they had kind of separate cultures that ran alongside each other, even in Europe.
Robyn Williams: But more sophisticated than people thought. The more you look at them, the more interesting they become.
Chris Stringer: Oh yeah, that's right. I mean, if we were talking 20 years ago, I would have been talking about this behavioural gap between us and Neanderthals, that they were, if you like, inferior. They probably weren't as clever, their brains weren't as high quality as ours, their technology was simpler, they didn't have things like art and jewellery and complex behaviour. Maybe they didn't even have full language. Well, now I don't think anyone would really argue that, but we know from a number of sites that Neanderthals have got complex behaviour.
I mean, there's a mysterious structure deep in a cave, Bruniquel in France, 300 metres into this cave in complete darkness, explorers discovered these structures made out of stalagmites. So they've dated them to 275,000 years ago. So this can only have been made by Neanderthals at a date like that. And what basically the Neanderthals did 170,000, 176,000 years ago was to go down there with artificial lighting. So they must have had torches to even be able to see what they were doing. And they went and systematically broke stalagmites to a set size, and then they dry-stone-walled these stalagmites into two oval structures. And no one knows why they did it.
So this is deep in a cave in darkness. They had lighting there. There's clearly evidence of fires around these structures. But the French archaeologists haven't yet excavated the inside of these structures, so we don't know if they were living there. Seems a strange place to live, but this was a cold stage, it might have been actually a reasonable place to live. There was running water going past it. There might have been hibernating cave bears, so you've got food not far away. So these dry-stone walls, which are about a metre tall, were actually part of a hut structure, and the rest of it's rotted away. Other people think these might be some ritual significance. Maybe they were worshiping the cave bears and built these structures. So we don't really know, but that shows the complexity of Neanderthal behaviour, and to do that means planning and organisation and pretty certainly complex language, because you've got to have a group of people to do this. You've got to get people down there with torches and keep the fires burning and go out and collect these stalagmites to a set size, then bring them back and build these walls. That must require language. I don't think they could have done it without proper language.
Robyn Williams: Indeed, if I can leap across back to our own district, just north of Australia, Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit, in other words, which lived quite recently, they thought in the beginning, about 18,000 years ago, that's almost coeval with human beings. And any idea where that may have originated from and what line?
Chris Stringer: Yeah, that's another big mystery. So the favoured theory is that it's a descendant of Homo erectus, so these earlier species which we know was on Java. It somehow got to Flores, and then it dwarfed down in size. So this process of island dwarfing, we know it happens for large mammals. So alongside Homo floresiensis on Flores there are these tiny stegodons. So these elephants have shrunk down to the size of large dogs. So this process happens to mammals, and on the main theory it happened to these humans as well. So Homo erectus got to Flores maybe a million years ago, and then shrank down in size to become Homo floresiensis. So that's the leading theory.
But there are a few things that don't quite fit. So the most complete skeleton has got some odd features which you find in fossils from Africa that are more than 2 million years old. So the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the shoulders, the body proportions, the small brain, minute bones in the wrists look much more like creatures more than 2 million years old than like what we suspect Homo erectus was like. So there is a minority opinion, which I'm sympathetic to.
It's even weirder, floresiensis, it's actually a descendant of something that was pre-human, and it got out of Africa before 2 million years ago and we've got no trace of it, and it got all the way over to the islands of Southeast Asia and possibly also to the Philippines, because there's a thing called Homo luzonensis on the Philippines, which looks like a similar dwarfing process and then, having died out everywhere else, it then survived on these islands until the last maybe 50,000 years. And what happened to them? Well, it's likely that Homo sapiens spread into the region, and they disappeared around that time. But we don't have as much detail as we have for, say, Europe and the Neanderthals.
Robyn Williams: The invasion story yet again.
Chris Stringer: Yes, the invasive species of Homo sapiens, that's what Robin Dennell has called us, yes.
Robyn Williams: A short history of you and yours. Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
