🔎The Mystery of the Hominins Tree 🌳🐉 Dragon Man

We have already talked about early human beings. 🌍 In our timelines, we have seen people move into places they had never seen before, meeting cold, heat, mountains, rivers and oceans, and learning how to live in those places. There were no supermarkets waiting for them, no weather forecasts and no instruction books telling them what to do. They had to look carefully, remember, experiment, help one another and invent.

And when humans first appeared on Earth, they came with some extraordinary gifts to help them—the same gifts you were born with. 👐 Hands that could work and create, 🧠 a mind that could imagine things that did not exist yet, and ❤️ a heart that could care for other people. With these gifts, humans made tools, found food, built shelters, protected children, communicated, cooperated and found many different solutions to the same human needs. That is one of the things our Human Timelines help us notice: different places, different problems, different shelters and inventions—but the same human needs.

Today we will follow the human story in a different way. Not along a timeline… but through a Family Tree. 🌳

Do you know what is a family tree? 🌳 ( Elict responces. ) You might be one of the newest little leaves at the very tip of the tree. Follow the branch beneath you and you can find your parents, then your grandparents, then older and older members of your family. Soon you will reach your great-great-great-grandparents, and then ancestors you may never even have heard of. But the family tree is enormous, with many, many, many leaves and branches. 🌳 If you keep following those branches backwards, you can travel through hundreds of years… thousands of years… hundreds of thousands of years… and you may discover ancestors who lived in different parts of the world. 🔎🌍🌳

Have you heard the word ancestor before? 👏AN-CES-TOR. 👏 From Latin preffix ante- which means “before,” combined with cedere which means “to go.” So we can think of ancestors as those who have gone before us. 👣 Today we are going to look at our big human Family Tree 🌳, but later you can make a family tree of your own. You can ask your parents or grandparents what they remember and see how far back you can trace your own ancestors. 🔎 Perhaps you will discover names, and stories of people you have never heard before!

Some of you might remember this tree from before. This is our Hominin Chart. Near the top we are close to today, and as our eyes travel downward we move farther and farther back through time. Some branches continue, some end, some divide and some become rather tangled. These are members of our enormous hominin family.

Have a look at the little pictures in the key. 🔎 Speech, Thrusting weapons, Shelter building, Controlled fire,🔥 ( Invite children to read the names ) These are clues to skills that our ancestors have learned and mastered over many many many years.

Now look at the names across the tree.They are arranged into four big groups, and even their names contain clues. 🔎( Invite the children to read the names ) Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo. Ardipithecus— means ground ape , so we might remember them as the ground apes. Then there is Australopithecus— that means southern ape. We also find Paranthropus—para means alongside and anthropos means human, so their name means something like alongside humans. And then there is the group Homo—the Latin word for human being. 🌳

Which group reaches closest to today? One of the youngest surviving branches, is us. Point to Homo sapiens. 👏HO-MO SA-PI-ENS. 👏Homo means human , and sapiens means wise or knowing. So we gave ourselves quite an impressive name: the knowing human! 🧠😄 We humans are also terribly curious. 🔎Can you agree with that? We keep digging. We keep exploring. We keep looking around. We keep asking, “What is this?” “Who was here?” “How far?” "How long ago?" "When?" "Who?" " How?"

This endless curiosity helped our ancestors discover, invent, solve problems and adapt to new places. And we keep asking questions and wonder about the past. That is where archaeologists come in. 🔎 They are like detectives of the past—they study the things people left behind. Every day, all over the world, they carefully dig, search and study clues from people who lived long ago. They might find a tooth, a finger bone, part of a skull, a leg bone, a tool or a piece of something someone once used. Then they compare, measure, sort and try to work out: Who did this belong to? How old is it? Where does it fit in the Hominin Tree? This is how we begin to understand where Homo sapiens lived in our big Family Tree, what the lives of Homo Neanderthalensis may have been like, and how other ancient members of our human family lived.

In 2008 ( or 18 years ago ) , archaeologists exploring Denisova Cave in Siberia found a clue so tiny you could almost miss it: a little piece of a child’s finger bone. 🦴 Look at your own little finger. Imagine finding only a fragment of one of those bones after 90,000 years! No face, no skull and no name. Was it the finger of a Homo sapiens? A Neanderthal? Or somebody whose name was not on our tree yet?

Thanks to all modern technologies scientists crushed little sample from the fossilised finger and searched inside it for ancient DNA. 🧬 Still no face, no name, but a surprising discovery! This little finger belonged to new group of ancient humans , but which one? They called these mysterious group of people the Denisovans, after after the cave in Siberia where the finger was found.

This discovery created a funny problem. Denisovans existed… but archeologists had no clue what they looked like. 🤔Imagine discovering that you have a long-lost cousin, but the only photograph anyone can give you is a picture of their little finger! 😄 No face, no hair, no height—almost nothing to help you recognize them. Even if your mysterious cousin walked right past you, you might never recognise it.

We know how other ancient members of our family tree looked like because scientists have found more of their bones. Look at Lucy, for example, from the Australopithecus branch. Some of you might already be as tall as Lucy—or even taller! 😄 👋She was only about 1 metre and 10 centimetres tall when she was a fully grown adult. And yet she was walking upright on two legs millions of years ago.

But back to your mysterious cousin with no face and just a little finger bone, the Denisovan. 🤔🦴Every now and then, someone finds something that makes everyone stare and wonder. 🤔 And that is exactly what happened farther east, in China. 🌏 This time it was not a tiny finger bone from a child, but a remarkably complete human skull.💀A mysterious face from the past! With a big braincase, heavy brow ridges and a broad face. It looked familiar but not quite...

The scientists measured and compared hundreds of skulls of other ancient humans. 🔎 The skull seemed to belong somewhere in the great Homo group—the human branch—but it did not fit neatly with the other species they already knew. So researchers gave it a new scientific name: Homo longi. Longi, because the skull was found near the region of Long Jiang, which translates into Dragon River. So this mysterious ancestor was given the nickname 🐉 the DRAGON MAN.

Scientists wanted to know more about him. So they looked closely at tiny clues preserved in Dragon Man’s skull and tooth. Then came an extraordinary discovery… the clues pointed to the Denisovans! 🧬🐉 Suddenly, the mysterious little finger from Siberia had a face! Scientists could finally begin to see what the Denisovans may have looked like. 💀✨

But now we have a problem with our Chart. 🌳❓

Can you find Denisovan written anywhere on our tree ? Look carefully! Can you find Homo longi? Then we have a missing ancient human group! Dragon Man is part of Denisovans. But exactly where should we place that group?

Now I wonder... 🔎 Did Denisovans ever meet Homo sapiens or Neanderthals? How long ago did Denisovans live? Did they make fire, tools, ornaments or clothing?What else archaeologists found about them ?

Then look again at the little symbols on our Hominin Chart. 🔥🏠🗡️ Did Denisovans control fire? Did they build shelters? What kinds of tools or weapons might they have used? Did they hunt? Where did they travel? What clues have archaeologists actually discovered?

After you have gathered enough evidence, take a small piece of paper and draw the branch you think might be missing from the chart. 🌿

Possible Follow Up Explorations 🔎

For the younger children, the follow-up can begin from something concrete and personal: their own family tree. They can write the names of family members, draw faces or add small photographs. They might take the tree home and ask parents or grandparents: “Who were your parents? What were their names? Where did they live? What do you remember about them?” They can add as many ancestors as their family knows. This gives the word ancestor a real meaning before they return later to the much deeper Hominin Family Tree.

With Montessori joy,
Vanina 😊