A Skull from China Rewrites the Story of Our Genus

In the humid hills of Hubei Province, on a terrace above the Han River, a fossil skull has been quietly redefining how scientists think about our genus. Known as Yunxian 2, the nearly one-million-year-old cranium has long been an enigma: too old and too unusual to fit comfortably into neat species categories. Now, after a meticulous digital reconstruction, researchers argue¹ it preserves a glimpse of the common ancestry behind Homo sapiens, Homo longi and the Denisovans.

“Yunxian sits at a pivotal point in the human family tree, bridging traits of earlier Homo erectus and later humans in Asia,” said Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

A digitally repaired, roughly 1-million-year-old Chinese skull has contributed to a new framework for human evolution. A replica of the reconstructed skull, center, sits between its original fossil version, right, and a second, more extensively crushed Homo skull from the same Chinese site. Guanghui Zhao