# @cgtneurope on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DPFJdJcgU3F
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/34998504-cgtneurope-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/63d22ac265.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-09-26T21:24:49.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** CGTN Europe (@cgtneurope) — https://gondola.cc/cgtneurope

## Caption

Ancient skull from China may shake up timeline of human evolution⁣
A skull found in China could shake up the understanding of how human evolution unfolded over the past million years and paleoanthropologists in China and the UK are getting excited.⁣
It’s all down to new studies into an ancient human skull, called Yunxian 2, unearthed in China's Hubei Province in 1990 that was so badly deformed during fossilization it was hard to gauge its significance. ⁣
Analysis now indicates the skull belongs to an early branch of a sister lineage to our own species and appears to be from a man aged 3o to 40, according to the team at Fudan University in Shanghai and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.⁣
Researchers used scanning and digital reconstruction techniques to determine the original shape of the skull, which is between 940,000 and 1.1 million years old, and compared it to over 100 other human fossils. ⁣
They said it appears to be the oldest-known member of an evolutionary lineage that included the enigmatic Denisovans who later roamed across Asia and interbred with our species Homo sapiens.⁣
Species in the human evolutionary line are called hominins. The skull previously was tentatively classified as belonging to the hominin species Homo erectus, which had body proportions resembling our own but a smaller brain size and different facial features. ⁣
If the skull sits close to the origins of both the Homo longi/Denisovan and Homo sapiens lineages, anthropologist and study co-author Chris Stringer of the London’s Natural History Museum said: “It may represent one of the most important windows yet into the evolutionary processes that shaped our genus around one million years ago."⁣
#fossils #china #uk #skull #evolution⁣
📷 Xijun Ni/Reuters

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## Tags

fossils, evolution, china, uk, skull

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