The ancient skulls you haven’t heard of

I want to show you one of the most important and also one of the most highly debated fossils in all of human evolution. Here it is. Dragon man. There's something so captivating about the big square eye sockets, the enormous brow ridges, the really flat head.

It's obviously human, recognizably human, and yet there's something so different about it, isn't there? It's truly a window into humanity's distant past. No doubt about it. It was given the nickname Dragon Man because it was found here in the Chinese city of Harbin, close to this railway bridge, I think, as long as I'm using this Chinese website correctly.

Harbin is in the province of Hilong Jiang, which means black dragon river, hence hence dragon man. Very cool name if you ask me. Very cool. Apparently, a worker building that railway bridge discovered the skull in 1933 during the Japanese occupation of northern China.

The worker suspected it was important, but he didn't want to report it to the Japanese. So, he hid it in a well. And then after World War II, he was worried that if it was revealed, the skull was revealed, he would have to admit that he helped the Japanese. So, there it stayed apparently in the well for 85 years until 2018 when, as a much older man, he donated it to science.

Now, I have no idea if that story is true at all. I find it hard to get any information about it. Even the name of the person who donated it, I I cannot find. Regardless though, it's certainly authentic and it added fuel to a pretty intense debate on where Chinese fossils fit in human evolution, which has just been brought to everyone's attention again, international attention again, by the successful sequencing of DNA from the Harbin cranium.

Or well, kind of. You'll see. Not quite the cranium. For all the attention this dragon man gets, it's far from the only puzzling fossil from China.

It's not even the biggest one. Despite how robust it looks, they're actually two quite significantly larger. Today, we're going to tell the story of human evolution from the from the perspective of these fossils. What do we know about Dragon Man?

Who are these larger fossils? Are they Denisven? And was there even a population of Neanderals hiding right under our noses since 1958? Guys, ...