Learning more about ancient humans is important if we want to understand humanity’s origins. That’s why it is always so exciting when scientists uncover ancient human skulls hidden in fossil records. An ancient human skull found in China is making waves because it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Tech. Entertainment. Science. Your inbox.
Sign up for the most interesting tech & entertainment news out there.
Email:
SIGN UP
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use and have reviewed the Privacy Notice.
The skull was uncovered by an international team of scientists that have described it as being “unlike any other hominin found before,” according to ScienceAlert. The skull has a more elongated top, and doesn’t seem to resemble any of the skulls of other ancient humans that we’ve uncovered in the past, including the Neanderthals, which you can see an example of in the article’s main image above.
These new bones are currently labeled as HLD 6 and were uncovered in Hualongdong, East Asia, in 2019. Scientists have tried to link the skull and bones of an ancient human to a known lineage of ancient humans without success since then.
The face is structured similarly to that of the modern human lineage, which is believed to have split from Homo erectus up to 750,000 years ago. The similarities stop there. For now, the belief is that this new discovery is the reveal of a previously unknown lineage between modern humans and the Denisovans, which would have split from the Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years ago.
Of course, this could all change as they learn more about the bones’ structure and if more fossils are discovered. The hominins fossils that have been found in China don’t always fit into a particular lineage. Scientists will have to do some work before they are able to say for sure where the ancient skull of this human is in history.
A paper on the ancient skull is available in the September edition of the Journal of Human Evolution.
The post Scientists found an ancient human skull that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before appeared first on BGR.
