Until recently, it was thought that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor around 600,000 years ago, but a prehistoric skull from China has just shattered that narrative. Dated to a million years ago, the cranium belongs to an extinct human clade which encompasses the Denisovans , indicating that we had already branched off from our sister lineage prior to this point. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Discovered in Hubei Province in 1990, the so-called Yunxian 2 skull has been at the center of a taxonomic confusion for the past 35 years, largely because the specimen is badly crushed and therefore difficult to study. Due to its age and the shape of its braincase, though, some scholars h

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