A million-year-old skull from China holds cues of Neanderthals, Denisovans and human origin

Researchers have effectively reconstructed the skull of a million years ago, a million years ago, discovered in China. The newly restored calaum may have belonged to a mystical Denisovan relative, providing clues to the rapid evolution of Asian homo sapiens.

In a study published Thursday (September 25) in Journal Science, researchers announced the reconstruction of Yunxian 2 Skull. It was excavated in 1990 from an archaeological site in Hubei Province, central China.

For decades, experts have believed that Yunxian’s skulls were from human ancestor Homoerectus, but new analysis revealed that they are more closely related to the “Dragon Man,” first described after the discovery of different skulls in northeastern China in 2021, and the “Dragon Man,” first described by the Denisovans, a mysterious group that disappeared 30,000 years ago.

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After digitally reconstructing the Yunxian two skulls using a computed tomography (CT) scan, the researchers noticed that they exhibited distinctive combinations of properties, including large skull capacity, long and low frontal skull bones, and narrow spaces between the sockets of the eye. This set of features is found in what researchers refer to as descendants of the same ancestor as homo longiculades, pedigrees or groups of individuals.

“The Homo Longi clades, including Denisovan, lasted over a million years,” Chris Stringer, co-author of the work of paleontologist Chris Stringer at the Museum of Natural History in London, told Live Science via email. “But so did the Neanderthal and Sapiens lineage.”

Based on statistical data from 57 fossil skulls, the researchers estimated that the Neanderthal clade first diverged from a common human ancestor 1.38 million years ago. After that, H. The longi clade branched out about 1.2 million years ago, followed by H. Sapiens about 102 million years ago. (However, H. Sapiens’ earliest clear fossil evidence comes from the 300,000-year-old bones of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.) This short time frame suggests that rapid diversification occurred in all three human groups.

However, researchers are unclear how these ancient human groups caused such diverse appearances to develop very quickly. “They lived in small, relatively isolated populations and adapted to a diverse paleoenvironment,” Xijun Ni, paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

But pushing back the origins of these ancient human groups means that experts can see early in time what factors may have led to human evolution.

“For example, there were two serious cold events around 1.1 million years and 900,000 years ago,” Stringer said.

Given the fusion of Yunxian 2 Skull’s 1 million-year-old date with ancient and modern physical properties, the researchers concluded in their study that it is likely to represent an early form of the group, including Denisovan.