Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists claim
Emerged originally in Africa and migrated to other continents over a
million years ago, homo erectus was the oldest known homo species. It is widely
accepted that it evolved and started to diverge into Homo longi, or “Dragon Man”,
Neanderthals, and our ancestor, Homo sapiens, around 600,000 years ago. Also, Homo
sapiens is thought to have emerged in Africa over 300,000 years ago and started
migrating across Eurasia 100,000 years ago. It is assumed that Homo sapiens and
Neandertals not only coexisted but also interacted and even interbred with each
other. Recently, researchers digitally reconstructed a badly crushed million-year-old
cranium of a Homo erectus that was unearthed from a riverbank in central China.
To their surprise, it was not the skull of a Homo erectus but a Homo sapiens. If
that is the case, these human species, Homo longi, Neanderthals, and Homo
sapiens co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years, much longer than
previously thought. There must be many more human remains waiting to be unearthed
around the world.
Read the article and learn about a revolutionary finding about human
evolution.
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