A team of scientists reckon an ancient skull could prove there is a whole new species of humans which could totally rewrite evolution.
The mysterious skull, discovered a few years ago, doesn’t appear to belong to modern humans, or Neanderthals or Denisovans according to experts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
The skull was uncovered in East China, along with a jaw and leg bones, in 2019 – and it’s been baffling scientists ever since.
They say it belonged to a 12 or 13-year-old child around a whopping 300,000 years ago.
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The team of researchers, working alongside China's Xi'an Jiaotong University, the UK's University of York, and Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution, believe this fossil, otherwise known as ‘HLD 6’, may prove there’s a missing link in the human family tree - potentially rewriting evolution as we know it.
The skull ‘did not possess a true chin’, making it more Denisovan-like. This is a subspecies that split from Neanderthals more than 400,000 years ago.
And yet, its facial structure resembles modern humans. But then, to keep it confusing, the limbs, skull cap, and chin ‘seem to reflect more primitive traits’.
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Researchers believe that the skull indicates an entirely new lineage of hominini - a hybrid between the branch leading to modern humans and the one that led to Denisovans.
Homo sapiens only began to emerge in Asia 120,000 years ago, which would mean there’s a third missing link in the hominin family tree in Asia.
"The combination of both archaic and modern human features identified in the HLD 6 mandible is unexpected, given its late Middle Pleistocene age,” scientists write.
"This mosaic pattern has never been recorded in late Middle Pleistocene hominin fossil assemblages in East Asia."
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This isn’t the first time the theory of evolution has been challenged.
It's widely known that humans came out of Africa millions of years ago; however, researchers discovered hominid footprints on the Greek island of Crete made 5.7 million years ago.
Professor Per Ahlberg, an author of the study, states that while the theory is controversial, our ancestors could have been in Europe far earlier than scientists thought, as per The Independent.
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"This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate," he said.
"Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen."
So, everything may not be quite as it seems for us mere humans.
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