A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than previously thought and in Asia not Africa, a new study said yesterday.
The findings are based on a reconstruction of a crushed skull discovered in China in 1990, and have the potential to resolve the longstanding “Muddle in the Middle” of human evolution, researchers said.
The skull, labelled Yunxian 2, was previously thought to belong to a human forerunner called Homo erectus.
Photo: Reuters
But modern reconstruction technologies used by a group of researchers found features that are closer to species previously thought to have existed only later in human evolution, including the recently discovered Homo longi and our own Homo sapiens.
“This changes a lot of thinking,” said Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum, London, who was part of the research team.
“It suggests that by one million years ago, our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed,” he added.
If the findings are correct, it suggests there could have been much earlier members of other early hominins, including Neanderthals and our own Homo sapiens line.
But it also “muddies the waters” on longstanding assumptions that early humans dispersed from Africa, said Michael Petraglia, director of Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre of Human Evolution, who was not involved in the study.
“There’s a big change potentially happening here, where east Asia is now playing a very key role in hominin evolution,” he said.
The research, published in the journal Science, used advanced CT scanning, structure light imaging and virtual reconstruction techniques to model a complete Yunxian 2.
The scientists relied in part on another similar skull to shape their model, and then compared it to over 100 other specimens.
The resulting model “shows a distinctive combination of traits,” the study said, some of them similar to Homo erectus, including a projecting lower face.
But other aspects, including its apparently larger brain capacity, are closer to Homo longi and Homo sapiens, the researchers said.
“Yunxian 2 may help us resolve what’s been called the ‘Muddle in the Middle,’ the confusing array of human fossils from between 1 million and 300,000 years ago,” Stringer said in a press release.
Much about human evolution remains debated, and Petraglia said the study’s findings were “provocative” though grounded in solid work.
“It’s sound, but I think the jury’s still out. I think there will be a lot of questions raised,” he said.
The findings are only the latest in a string of recent research that has complicated what we thought we know about our origins.
Homo longi, also known as “Dragon Man,” was itself only named as a new species and close human relative in 2021.
The authors said their work illustrates the complexity of our shared history.
“Fossils like Yunxian 2 show just how much we still have to learn about our origins,” said Stringer.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS