Dragon man

And so that brings us finally to Homo longi and Homo juluensis.

These taxa represent a collection of Asian fossils that includes the Harbin cranium and the Xujiayao skeletal remains that don't exactly look like Homo erectus or modern humans.

More like something in between.

And there's a huge debate underway right now to figure out what these fossils represent.

And, uh, if you look at the molars of the Xujiayao molars, and you look at the Denisovan molars, they're almost exactly the same.

And it's not contested.

Uh, everybody agrees that you could probably change these out, you know, switch them around, and nobody would really know the difference between the- these molars, right? And, you know, the Harbin camp, the longi camp can't make the same argument.

So it's pretty interesting how all of this is, is playing out.

The family dug it up and donated it to a university.

In 2021, scientists described it and gave it a new species name, Homo longi, or Dragon Man, after the Black Dragon River.

But a lot of people looked at that skull and thought, "Hold on a second.

Big brow ridges, huge molars, a brain as big as ours.

This looks like what we'd expect a Denisovan to look like." So in 2025, a team extracted proteins from the bone, and for good measure, scraped the fossilized plaque off its one remaining tooth and pulled mitochondrial DNA out of that.

Both said the same thing.

Dragon Man was a Denisovan.

After 15 years, the ghost had a face.

Okay.

Then I'm going to go with Dragon Man.

Who is Dragon Man? Dragon Man is an android that basically babysits Reed and Sue's kids.

And he looks like a dragon, talks like a man, is a robot.

Dragon

Man, Robot.

I

love Dragon Man.