Homo juluensis

story.So after that, you've got Homo erectus, uh, you know, in, in Indonesia and in, uh, in China, uh, that's fairly widespread at that time.

And then after that, you know, once we get into the Chibanian or the Middle Pleistocene, you see the appearance of Homo juluensis and Homo longi, the two newest, uh, uh, proposed species, uh, that are out there.

And then when we get into, uh, the, the more recent time periods, the Late Pleistocene, we- we've got Homo floresiensis and then Homo luzonensis, uh, in the Philippines.

Okay, let's just pause for a second here and unpack everything that Chris just said, because he not only introduced a ton of new characters into our story about Asia, but he's also alluding to the backstory about Asian archaeology and paleoanthropology that's being challenged right now.

Over time, these isolated populations evolved independently, most notably by getting shorter through an evolutionary process called insular dwarfism.

And if you want to hear more about them, then check out season one, episode seven with John McNab.

But to understand Homo longi and Homo juluensis, we have to start with another archaic human, the Denisovans.

In 2010, researchers announced the discovery of a previously unknown lineage of archaic humans in southern Siberia.

But it's interesting if we actually go back and restudy that fossil now, now that the field seems to be much more open to the idea that Neanderthals are actually much more widespread than previously assumed, right? So it hasn't been reclassified yet.

So if you go to the, you know, where, you know, the papers that we've been publishing in recent years, we keep it as an outlier, separate from Homo longi and separate from Homo juliensis.

The Maba fossil and then Hathnora in India, there's a lot of similarities there.

And so people have suggested that these two fossils may be very, very similar, right? And they could be assigned to the same.