HONOLULU (KHON2) -- University of Hawaii at Manoa Anthropology Professor Christopher Bae likens his discovery to piecing together a giant puzzle, but with fossils. Get Hawaii's latest morning news delivered to your inbox, sign up for News 2 You After more than 30 years of studying ancient human ancestors in Asia, Bae believes he's discovered a missing piece, and the moment of realization was the highlight of his career. Assets School students triumph at chess and video game tournament "The Homo juluensis fossil species is based off of the fossils from a site called  Xujiayao, in northern China that was actually discovered and excavated in the 1970s," Bae said. "They found hominin fossils then, but they were all in different pieces. So what happened is that a couple of years ago, my colleagues in China, they did a virtual reconstruction of the pieces and ended up having what's referred to as the posterior part, the back part, of the skull. We were able to reconstruct that and then we said, 'You know what? This actually doesn't look anything like Homo sapiens, and it doesn't look anything like these other fossils.' So that's how we started to think that we are onto something." The new species is called Homo juluensis and lived in Eastern Asia around 50,000 years ago. They were likely good hunters. A notable characteristic is their rather large heads. "Homo erectus, has a average cranial capacity of about 1000 cubic centimeters. That means ours is about 1300cc, so we're larger than Homo erectus," Bae said. "So one of the distinguishing characteristics about Homo juluensis, has an average cranial capacity between 17 and 1800cc." The study is significant because it adds to our understanding of human evolution and helps bridge gaps in fossil records of Asia, which is often overshadowed by discoveries in Africa and Europe. "A lot of the people working in Asia said, 'You know what? The fossils in China don't look anything like the European fossils. They don't look anything like the African fossils.' But the Western Palace anthropologists kept insisting that we're just going to group these guys into this name heidelbergensis," Bae said. "And now it's becoming clear that the fossils in China should clearly have different a different name." Bae was adopted by an American family as a 1-year-old. He said his lifelong search for his identity is likely what led him into paleoanthropology. "One of the ways of easily describing paleoanthropology is trying to reconstruct all the pieces without the big picture, without having all the pieces," Bae said. "The first year of my life is blank. Nobody really know. My Korean name is not real. My date of birth is not real. And so I've always been interested in trying to identify those aspects. That's what kind of drew me to paleoanthropology, because it's kind of reconstructing a puzzle without having all the pieces." Bae said the work is far from over. More research is needed to confirm how Homo juluensis fits into the human family tree. If he met Homo juluensis in person, Professor Bae said he'd probably ask him one thing. "I would ask, are there more and where can I find them," Bae said with a laugh. Find more Hawaii, Oahu, Maui and Kauai news here Bae's recent research is published in Nature Communications.