当来自远古东方的生命低语穿越时空抵达耳畔，它邀请我们以更谦卑的姿态理解人类在自然中的位置，对所有曾经存在过的智慧生命报以深沉敬意，并以此为基础，迈出走向未来的坚实步伐。

撰稿人：何博媛

Brushing Off the Dust of Time: From the Name "Homo longi" to the Origins of Civilization

Editor's Note: As scientists brush the dust from Homo longi skull fossil, we are not only witnessing a scientific breakthrough that rewrites the history of human evolution, but also a profound encounter with the ancient East. This ancient discovery pushes the geographical stage of Chinese civilization to a deeper historical dimension: for the hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of writing, bronze, and city-states, this land was already the setting for a magnificent epic of intelligent life. Although Homo longi is not the direct creator of Chinese civilization, its existence profoundly impacts how we understand the origin and continuity of civilization. This dialogue across time not only concerns "who we are" but also how we comprehend this Eastern land that has carried countless life experiments.

On September 26, 2025, Beijing time, the internationally renowned academic journal Science published a landmark study completed by a multi-institutional team in China. Through high-precision CT reconstruction and geometric morphometric (GMM) analysis, researchers discovered that the Yunxian Man skull shares features such as a flat face, supraorbital torus, and cranial capacity with the Heilongjiang Homo longi skull, while being significantly different from Homo erectus. The study thus suggests that the "Yunxian Man" skull, previously considered Homo erectus, is actually an early representative of the "Homo longi" (Homo longi) lineage, which is closely related to the mysterious ancient human, the Denisovans. This conclusion not only significantly pushes back the divergence time of the modern human, Neanderthal, and Homo longi lineages, but also, beyond the scientific dimension, opens a new window for us to look back at the ancient history of the East.