A million-year-old Homo erectus skull may have been found in China

Work is being done to unearth a rare, nearly perfectly preserved hominin skull in central China.

The finding of an ancient human skull in central China is being hailed as a significant find by researchers. Archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists hope that as excavation of the wonderfully intact fossil progresses, it will provide a more complete picture of the complex family tree of archaic humans that formerly roamed Eurasia.

The skull was found on May 18 at an excavation site 20 kilometers west of Yunyang, also known as Yunxian, in the Hubei region of central China. I covered initial news of it in September, 2022. More was covered by Nature¹. According to researchers, it is located 35 meters from two other skulls that were discovered there in 1989 and 19901 and is most likely from the same species of prehistoric people.

The skulls of Yunxian 1 and 2 were distorted after millennia underground.Credit: Alamy

The third skull appears to be in decent shape, in contrast to those other findings, which were crushed and warped after spending millennia underground. Digital reconstructions of the second skull were made in 2010², and it was then determined that it most likely belonged to the extinct human species Homo erectus. The Yunxian humans lived between 1.1 million and 800,000 years ago, according to dating of soil and animal fossils from the site.