In 1990, an ancient human skull was unearthed in China’s Hubei Province that was so badly deformed during fossilization that it was hard to gauge its significance. A new analysis now indicates that the skull belongs to an early branch of a sister lineage to our species in a finding that may shake up the understanding of how human evolution unfolded over the past million years or so.

Researchers used sophisticated scanning and digital reconstruction techniques to determine the original shape of the skull, which is between 940,000 and 1.1 million years old, and compared it to more than 100 other human fossils. They said it appears to be the oldest-known member of an evolutionary lineage that included the enigmatic Denisovans who later roamed a wide swathe of Asia and interbred with our spec

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