A 300,000-Year-Old Skull Doesn’t Match Any Human Species

In 1958, a group of farmers walked into a cave near the town of Maba in Guangdong Province, China.

They were there to collect bat droppings to use as fertilizer. But deep inside the cave, they found something completely unexpected—a human skull.

Experts later named the skull Maba 1. They dated it to around 300,000 years ago. It clearly belonged to an early human species, writes Historienet.

The Mysterious Skull Doesn’t Fit Any Known Human Species

But researchers couldn’t agree on exactly which one. Many thought it was a Neanderthal, a close cousin of modern humans.

Years later, scientists decided to take a fresh look at the skull. They used modern tools and scanned the fossil with a CT scanner. No one had ever examined the inside of the skull before.

The scans showed details of the braincase and sinus structures. It became clear that this skull probably did not belong to a Neanderthal.

It also didn’t match Homo erectus or the Denisovans, two other extinct human relatives. In fact, the skull didn’t look like any known species.

This surprised the researchers. The fossil seemed to represent something new. It might belong to a previously unknown type of ancient human.

They published their findings in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Could Rewrite Human History

Maba 1 includes the top of the skull, bones from the right side of the face, and part of the nose.

Its strange mix of features has made it hard to classify. But that’s not unusual for fossils from this time.

The skull dates back to the Middle Pleistocene. That was a time when many human species lived at once.

Fossils from that period have also been found in Africa and across Eurasia. Some of them, like Maba 1, don’t clearly fit into any known group.

The study of Maba 1 reminds us that human evolution wasn’t a straight line. It was messy and complex.

Many human species likely shared the planet at the same time, and we’re still figuring out how they all fit together.