Scientists may have discovered a new type of us — human, that is. It’s called Homo juluensis and they had big-ass heads, so big that the “juluensis” in Homo juluensis literally means “big head.” Since Homo means human or man, their full name is Human Big Head.
Good thing they’re too dead to hear that because they’d be pissed.
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The incredible discovery was documented in Nature Communications by Prof. Christopher J. Bae from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Social Sciences, along with a paleontologist from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Xiujie Wu.
The researchers estimate that Homo juluensis lived around 300,000 to as recently as 50,000 years ago in eastern Asia. They may have been a part of a larger group that also included the Denisovans, a mysterious population of ancient humans that we know largely via genetic evidence left in the very few physical remains found in Siberia, Tibet, and Laos.
Homo juluensis looked a little bit like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens with one big, huge difference being their giant heads. These dudes had some seriously swollen melons, like 1700 to 1800 cubic centimeters—around 500 to 600 centimeters bigger than today’s average human head. We know this because Professor Bae and his team have found and analyzed the remains of 16 Homo juluensis.
Its bigger head means it did have a bigger brain, but that doesn’t mean it was smarter than any other type of human existing at the time. They were at least smart enough to make stone tools, indicating a high level of adaptation and some degree of complex social interaction.
The evidence found also suggests that they turned animal hides into clothing to protect against harsh winters. They hunted wild horses, using up as much of the corpses as they could, right down to the bone marrow.
Bae gives a lot of the credit for the discovery to his team’s innovative way of organizing fossil evidence that makes it easier to parse evidence left behind by ancient humans who roamed what we now consider China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
