Homo Longi face

The Brazilian anthropologist reconstructed the face of an archaic person Homo Longi on a well-preserved skull discovered in the north-east of China in the 1930s.

The ancient skull was found in Harbin in 1933 during the construction of the iron -sized Most a Dunjiang through the Sungari River , but only by 2018 he got into the laboratory to paleoanthropolists. The worker that found the skull, understanding its importance for science, decided to hide the find from the authorities of the state of the manzhou-controlled by Japan. After the Second World War, he also was in no hurry to report the communist authorities found skull, as he was afraid of persecution for work on the "Japanese militarists." The skull all this time was hidden in the old well. Only before his death did the worker spoke about his find to his grandchildren, and they pulled the skull from the well. Later in the same year, the Chinese paleoanthropologist Ji Tsyan convinced his family to transfer it to the Habeic Geological University, where he has been stored since.

Information about the exact place of the find and the layer of deposits in which the skull was located was lost. In 2021, the Chinese geologist Shao Tsinfen and his colleagues conducted a non -destructive radiofluorescence analysis, analysis of the isotopes of rare -earth elements and the strontium of the skull and various fossils of mammals found around the Dunjiang bridge, and determined that all the fossils probably come from the formation of the Upper Juanshan, dated 309-138 Thousands of years ago. Direct uranium dating of various points of the skull gave a wide range of dates: from 296 to 62 thousand years ago, which is probably caused by leaching uranium. Statistically the most likely minimum age of the skull is 146 thousand years.

The Harbin skull is larger than that of all other archaic people. It is also relatively elongated and low, unlike a more spherical skull of modern man. He has larger, almost square eye sockets, thick tutors, large nasal hole, wide mouth and large teeth. The internal volume is 1420 ml, which corresponds to the range for Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and exceeds the volume of skulls of earlier homo types . The skull has only one tooth, the upper left second molar, it surpasses the size of similar teeth of modern people. Scientists believe that the skull belonged to a man about 50 years old.

The reconstruction of the face was performed by the Brazilian researcher of Sisero Moraes, using the data of computed tomography of the Harbin skull. “In order to make an approximation of the face possible, it was necessary to restore the jaw and absent teeth. For this purpose, the full skull of Homo Erectus was used , which underwent some structural deformations and accurately corresponded to the area of ​​the teeth. The remaining molar served as a model for aligning the rest of the teeth, as well as the alveoli of the upper jaw. Thanks to the wide range of information available in previous works, it was possible to reconstruct the face of Homo Longi , as well as to conduct some measurements and comparisons with other types, ”the author of the work says.

The results were published in the journal Ortogonlinemag.