Dragon Man
A skull hidden in a Chinese well for eighty years turns out to be the face of a Denisovan.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
The Harbin cranium was reportedly found during bridge construction in 1933 and concealed in a well to keep it from Japanese occupying forces, resurfacing only in 2018. It is a massive, well-preserved skull at least 146,000 years old with a brain in the modern range, named Homo longi — dragon man — in 2021. In 2025, DNA recovered from hardened dental plaque matched the Denisovans. After fifteen years of being a genome without a face, the Denisovans finally had one.