An ancient skull, warped and damaged by the ravages of time and degradation, may have just altered our understanding of the history of modern humans.
Using careful 3D scanning and digital reconstruction techniques, a team of researchers from China and the UK has rebuilt the damaged artifact, discovering exactly where it fits on the hominid family tree.
It’s not the skull of a modern human ancestor, but that of a closely related human. Even so, its age pushes back the timeline for the divergence between the ancestor of Homo sapiens and its close relatives, suggesting that the origin of our species is several hundred thousand years older than we thought it was.
The morphological traits of the skull, and its age, suggest all these species diverged from each other much sooner than we thought. According to previous estimates, modern humans and Neanderthals diverged around 500,000 to 700,000 years ago.
According to the new calculations, however, the splits occurred all within a very short timeframe of each other, starting around 1.38 million years ago, with Neanderthals peeling off first.
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