Farmers Dug Up a 300,000-Year-Old Skull. It’s Unlike Any Human Ancestor We’ve Ever Seen.

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

The fragmented Maba 1 skull, which had previously been described as belonging to a Neanderthal, is not so Neanderthal after all.
Researchers reassessed the skull and found resemblances to Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, but it didn’t exactly fit into any of these species. It is most similar to other debatable hominin specimens.
Maba 1 also suffered trauma before death, but the specific cause of the trauma remains unknown.

In 1958, in a narrow trench of an eroded limestone cave near Maba Village in Shaoguan City, China, local farmers were digging up bat guano for fertilizer when they came across something unusual. Fossilized fragments of bone surfaced that looked somewhat human, and were later determined to be part of a skull (and several facial bones). But which of our ancestors this skull belonged to has remained a mystery.

At a glance, Maba 1 seems like any other skull fragment—and that is the whole problem. Because no other parts of the skull were ever found, it was nearly impossible to positively identify the fragment as having come from a particular species of hominin. The only thing researchers knew for certain is that the bone dates back to the late Middle Pleistocene and is about 300,000 years old. While it had previously been determined to belong to a Neanderthal, a team of researchers who previously studied the skull have now reevaluated it and found contradictory features that aredifficult to ignore.

“[Maba 1] is well-known for the Neanderthal-like face, while its neurocranium shows affinities with many hominin taxa, which makes the taxonomic status of Maba 1 controversial,” they wrote in a study recently published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Until now, the skull fragments had been observed externally, but much about their internal structures was still unknown. So, the skull was reconstructed using data from micro-CT scans, which can image the inside of a fossil without damaging the actual specimen. The scans made one thing very clear: the skull probably wasn’t from a Neanderthal. Channels in the sinuses that veins once used to ferry blood through spongy diploid bone were connected to the parietal foramen towards the back of the skull by tubular structures—a very rare occurence in Homo neandertalensis.

The inside of the skull’s frontal lobe turned out to be morphologically closer to Homo erectus than Neanderthals or Homo sapiens (though Homo erectus had a smaller brain than its two counterparts), and the cranial capacity of Maba 1 was more like that of Neanderthals and modern humans. But while the researchers agreed that Maba 1 seemed closest to H. erectus, differences from the morphological standards of the species were too obvious to ignore. The frontal lobe was short in comparison, and the bregma—where the coronal (lengthwise) and sagittal (crosswise and perpendicular to the coronal) sutures meet—was thicker than that of H. erectus.

Maba 1 also shows signs of trauma—a dark, semicircular lesion on the external right side of the frontal bone, which spans the area from the middle of the head to the bridge of the nose. Signs of healing suggest that the individual suffered this injury while still alive, though it is unclear whether the lesion healed completely and what exactly caused it. There were no signs of infection. While it could have been left behind by an impact such as a fall, it is also possible that such a lesion was the result of anemia, or even a tumor.

Strangely enough, the researchers concluded that Maba 1 is more similar to other debatable hominin skulls, such as the LH18 specimen found in Tanzania, which is thought to be an early Homo sapiens skull. There are also resemblances to the Djebel Irhoud skulls from Morocco (first assumed to be Neanderthal remains but now thought to be from some of the earliest known Homo sapiens) and Zambia’s Broken Hill skull (a Homo heidelbergensis specimen now at the Natural History Museum in London).

“The internal structures of Maba 1 show a combination of morphological features found in various species,” the researchers concluded. “These findings further evidence the high morphological variability among Asian hominins in the late Middle Pleistocene. Maba 1 currently cannot be definitely classified in any known hominin taxon.”

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