In 1960, a villager found something terrifyingly creepy in Greece’s Petralona cave —a humanoid cranium with a protrusion on its forehead, fused to the cave wall. Since then, researchers have been trying to date the strange specimen and understand how it got there, but these efforts so far have yielded only a frustratingly broad age range of between around 170,000 and 700,000 years.

The skull’s ambiguous stratigraphic position is also less than helpful. So a team of researchers took a slightly different approach, dating the skull’s unicorn-like calcite protrusion. In turn, they’ve narrowed the potential age of the specimen and potentially shed light on a mysterious ancient hominid.

The study was published last month in the Journal of Human Evolution.

A mysterious species

“I saw the

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