A crushed skull unearthed in the Yunxian region of China’s Hubei province in 1990 may rewrite the human evolution timeline, according to a new study published on Sept. 25 in Science.
Decades after its initial discovery, the million-year-old fossil, known as Yunxian 2, was finally reconstructed using CT scans and light imaging. The digital reconstruction revealed features that belong to Homo longi, an Asian clade that encompasses the Denisovans and is regarded as a sister branch to Homo sapiens. According to scientists, the results suggest that by 1 million years ago, early humans had already diverged into distinct groups, pushing back the split between Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans by several hundred thousand years.
“This changes a lot of thinking,” said coauthor Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum. The finding implies that modern humans and Denisovans may share a closer ancestry than with Neanderthals, and that East Asia played a larger role in shaping our evolutionary story than once assumed.