5 Mysterious Human Species That Once Lived Among Us

In 1933, amidst the construction of Dongjiang Bridge in Northern China, a local laborer stumbled upon an extraordinary find—a nearly perfectly preserved human skull hidden within the riverbank’s layers of sediment. During that period, the city of Harbin, the skull’s discovery site, was under Japanese occupation as part of the larger Manchukuo state. The laborer was probably aware of the skull’s potential significance, owing to the excitement generated just a few years earlier by the discovery of another archaic human skull, known popularly as the Peking Man. Taking extreme care, the laborer concealed his remarkable find in an abandoned well, where it would lie undisturbed for almost nine decades. Even after the Soviets invaded Manchuria, the man kept his secret well-guarded, worried that his previous work under Japanese rule could be scrutinized. It wasn’t until his final moments that the laborer confided in his grandchildren about the ancient relic, still stashed in its secret hi