The year human evolution’s greatest mystery got a face


Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025.

Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the scientific community in 2010, when it revealed a previously unknown human population that had, in the distant past, encountered and interbred with our own species, Homo sapiens. This enigmatic group became known as the Denisovans after Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, where the pinkie finger was found.

Despite intimate knowledge of this population’s genetic makeup, traces of which millions of people carry today, scientists knew nothing about the appearance of the Denisovans, or where they lived or why they disappeared. The discovery, and the questions it unleashed, galvanized a generation of geneticists, archeologists and paleoanthropologists.

Some of that work paid off this year, and scientists at last put a face to the Denisovan name by extracting new clues from another well-known fossil: a prehistoric human skull that didn’t seem to fit with any known group. Now, other jigsaw pieces have begun to fall into place.

Enter ‘Dragon Man’

When the skull came to light in Harbin in northeastern China in 2018 after being stashed for safekeeping at the bottom of a well for decades, some scientists had a hunch that it might be Denisovan.

DNA sequences from the group had been detected in the genomes of present-day Asians, but not Europeans, suggesting that this region was where the Denisovans predominantly lived.

Based on its distinctive shape, the researchers attributed the skull to a newfound species they called Homo longi or “Dragon Man.” The dozen or so Denisovan fossils that had been identified since 2010 using DNA were too small and fragmentary to warrant an official species name.

Getting ancient DNA from the skull, which was estimated to be 146,000 years old, was the key to understanding whether there was a link between Dragon Man and the Denisovans. However, it proved to be tricky.

A team led by Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist and professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, tested six bone samples from Dragon Man’s lone surviving tooth and the cranium’s petrous bone, a dense piece at the base of the skull that’s often a rich source of DNA in fossils. However, the samples yielded no results.

But Fu, who as a young researcher had been part of the team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, that first discovered the Denisovans, reported in June that her team had been able to retrieve Denisovan genetic material from an unexpected source: Dragon Man’s dental calculus — the gunk left on teeth that can over time form a hard layer and preserve DNA from the mouth.

That information wasn’t a slam-dunk result. The genetic material researchers had retrieved was mitochondrial DNA, which, unlike nuclear DNA, is only inherited through the maternal line, providing an incomplete picture of an individual’s genomic ancestry. This finding meant, potentially, that Dragon Man could have been a mix of two species, something that’s not unprecedented. In 2018, scientists revealed a fossilized bone from Denisova Cave that belonged to a girl with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan dad.

However, the team also recovered protein fragments from the petrous bone samples, which — though less detailed than DNA — suggested the Dragon Man skull belonged to a Denisovan population.

Together, the two lines of evidence “cleared up some of the mystery surrounding this population,” Fu told CNN in June when the research was published. “After 15 years, we know the first Denisovan skull.”

The DNA finding makes it likely that Homo longi will become the official designation for the dozen or so other Denisovan fossils, Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and research leader in human evolution at London’s Natural History Museum, said in an email.

Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner, paleoanthropologists at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, agreed, although they said the name Denisovan would likely persist as a popular name, much like how most people call Homo neanderthalensis Neanderthals today.

“While more work needs to be done to build the body of evidence and give scientists a more complete view of Denisovan anatomy, habitat, and behaviour, being able to link complete fossils with the molecular evidence is a huge step forward,” McRae and Pobiner wrote in an annual list of the top stories in human evolution.

Additional evidence could be in hand, waiting to be identified, researchers suggest, and with it 2026 could be set for more groundbreaking revelations.


A portrait of a Denisovan

A skull fossil, with its telltale bumps and ridges, can reveal a great deal about what an individual looked like, according to John Gurche, a paleoartist who creates reconstructions of ancient human ancestors for museums, including the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. He recreated Dragon Man’s face for National Geographic.

Assuming the Dragon Man skull belonged to a typical Denisovan individual, scientists said the ancient human would have had pronounced brow ridges, large teeth and lacked our high foreheads. But, if dressed in modern attire, this prehistoric relative may not have drawn too many stares on a subway train.

Gurche said that he uses known relationships between soft and bony tissue in humans and apes to recreate facial features, such as the breadth of the eyeball, dimensions of nasal cartilage and the thickness of soft tissue in some parts of the face. More challenging were features about which the skull “offers little information,” including the form of the lips and ears, and placement of the hair.

With molecular evidence now linking Dragon Man to the Denisovans, it will be easier for paleoanthropologists to identify other potential Denisovan remains, including skull fossils from sites in China that have long defied classification.

More revelations could come from another skull fossil discovered in China in 2022, which hasn’t been formally described in scientific literature. It’s the third skull to be unearthed at the site known as Yunxian in China’s Hubei province and is thought to date back around one million years. The other two craniums were found in 1990.

A digital reconstruction published in September of the second skull, which was badly squashed, from the site suggested it was an early ancestor of Dragon Man, meaning the lineage could have originated much earlier than previously thought.

The researchers’ wider analysis, based on the reconstruction and more than 100 other skull fossils, also significantly pushes back the timeline for the emergence of species such as our own, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis, by 400,000 years.

However, the findings attracted some skepticism. More details about the third Yunxian skull would enable the team to test the accuracy of the reconstruction and its placement within the human family tree.
Oldest genome poses new questions

A 200,000-year-old tooth, similar in appearance to the molar still attached to Dragon Man’s skull, may be set to shake up what’s known about the Denisovans and the human family tree more broadly next year and beyond. Researchers found the tooth during an excavation of Denisova Cave in 2020.

Stéphane Peyrégne, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and his colleagues have since analyzed the molar and from it recovered a Denisovan’s full genome — a highly detailed set of genetic information that can reveal past genetic diversity and evolution.

It’s only the second time scientists have been able to sequence a “high coverage” genome from a Denisovan fossil — the first was from the finger fossil that revealed the Denisovans’ existence.

The scientists shared the genome analysis in October on what’s known as a preprint server, which allows study authors to post early versions of their work online, and is undergoing peer review by other researchers. Peyrégne declined to comment on the paper until it’s formally published next year. Stringer described the findings as “very important.”

The genome allows further investigation of Denisovan biological traits that may influence human health today. For example, a study published in August suggested that a Denisovan gene variant involved in the production of mucous and saliva may have helped Homo sapiens adapt to new environments.

The new genome is also much older than the first and allows geneticists to probe more deeply into Denisovan history and reconstruct relationships between different ancient populations.

The genome represents a Denisovan man who lived in a small group 200,000 years ago in Denisova Cave. The group’s analysis revealed that not only had his ancestors apparently interbred with early Neanderthals, but the individual also had ancestry from an unknown “super archaic” group for which there is currently no ancient DNA match.

McRae at the Smithsonian said traces of these “ghost lineages” have been found in the DNA of modern humans as well, and scientists aren’t sure who they are. They could represent other extinct hominins such as Homo erectus or Homo floresiensis, sometimes known as the “hobbit.”

“Or, it could represent hominins that we genuinely haven’t found in the fossil record. They’re ghosts until we have something to trace them back to,” he said via email.

Figuring out the identity of this group will be a fresh mystery for experts in human evolution to ponder in 2026.

By Katie Hunt, CNN

#Rome to charge visitors for access to Trevi Fountain.

Tourists will have to pay a two-euro entrance fee to get close to Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain, which draws vast crowds daily, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said on Friday.

The monument, located in a public square, will still be able to be viewed from a distance for free, but closer access will be only for ticket holders, Gualtieri told a press conference.

“From February 1 we are introducing a paid ticket for six sites” in the Italian capital, including the Trevi Fountain, he said.

Entrance to the other five sites will cost five euros.

The backdrop to the most famous scene in Federico Fellini’s film “La Dolce Vita”, when actress Anita Ekberg takes a dip, the 18th-century fountain is top of the list for many visitors exploring the Eternal City.

Making a wish and tossing a coin into the water is such a tradition that authorities collect thousands of euros a week that are then given to the Caritas charity.

As a result of the fountain’s fame, the crowds in the square surrounding the Baroque masterpiece are often so deep that it is hard to get a proper look.

Between January 1 and December 8 some nine million tourists have visited the area just in front of the fountain -- an average of 30,000 people a day, Gualtieri said.

The area has been targeted by pickpockets and Rome officials have debated different ways of regulating access for years.

Rome residents will be allowed free access.

New #frescoes unearthed in villa near Pompeii show ‘extraordinary details and colours’.

The discoveries were made at the Villa Poppaea in Oplontis, a large residence dating from the mid-first century B.C. that may have belonged to Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of Emperor Nero, or to her family.

#Archeologists found a near complete peahen fresco, missing its head, and mirroring a previously found peacock fresco, as well as fragments of a theatrical comedy mask, complementing other theatrical tragedy masks from the same hall.

The excavations also revealed the imprint of trees in the villa’s garden, left by lava casts, and four rooms, adding to the 99 already excavated, including one thought to have been part of the villa’s thermal baths.

The discoveries “offer promising new research prospects for understanding the layout of the villa and studying long-term interactions between human settlers and the natural environment,” park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said.

The once-thriving city of Pompeii, near Naples, and its surroundings were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, but its remains have survived after being submerged for centuries by a thick blanket of ash and lava.

(Reporting by Claudia Cristoferi and Alvise Armellini, editing by Alex Richardson)

Discovery of ancient bee nests in fossils points to a never-before-seen behaviour.


The findings help to fill a gap in the fossil record since all other bee fossils described in the Caribbean were discovered within amber and are much older, dating back around 20 million years, Viñola-López explained.

The study authors believe that fossils housing the bee nests date back to around 20,000 years ago and could shed light on how bees have adapted to their environment, even in the ancient past.

“There’s very little known about the ecology of many of the bees on these islands,” Viñola-López said. “This shows that the diversity of nesting processes of bees is actually really big and sometimes expands past what we think is normal. … It also tells that we have to, when we prepare specimens, look closer for all the things that can get preserved inside these ones, which can show very strange behaviours of species that we think that we understand relatively well.”
A fossil within a fossil

Viñola-López was exploring the cave with colleagues in the summer of 2022, looking for specimens to study for his doctoral program at the University of Florida and the Florida Museum of Natural History. The cave itself holds a story, as it contains layer upon layer of fossils from more than 50 species, including rodents, birds and reptiles.

#Astronomers detect cosmic flash from early universe star blast.


An immensely powerful flash detected earlier this year was created by a massive star exploding when the universe was just five percent of its current age, astronomers said Tuesday.

The flash was spotted on March 14 by a French-Chinese space telescope called SVOM, which launched last year on a mission to track gamma-ray bursts, the brightest and most powerful explosions in the cosmos.

When the young scientists working on the mission for France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) received a mobile phone alert that a major burst had arrived at Earth, they urged other telescopes to turn towards the source.

It came from a star around a hundred times bigger than our Sun that exploded 700 million years after the Big Bang, according to two studies published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

“This is extremely rare -- it’s the fifth most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected,” said Bertrand Cordier, the CEA’s scientific lead for SVOM and a co-author of both studies.

“The photons that reached our instruments travelled for 13 billion years” to reach Earth, he told AFP.

The detection of the burst, which lasted tens of seconds, is also “the most precise in terms of the light we collected and the measurements we made,” he added.
- Glimpse of ancient cosmos -

Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe, Cordier explained. They are thought to be caused by cataclysmic cosmic events such as massive stars going supernova or when binary neutron stars merge.

These flashes can release as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun will emit during its 10-billion-year life.

They shoot out matter at “speeds close to the speed of light”, creating conditions impossible to reproduce on Earth, Cordier said.

These bright flashes also act as “probes” of the cosmos, illuminating all the matter they pass through before finally reaching us, he added.

This allows scientists a rare glimpse into the distant past of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old.

The gamma-ray burst in March, called GRB250314A, was created by an explosion during the first generation of stars formed after the Big Bang.

These stars produced the first heavy elements -- such as iron, carbon and oxygen -- which played a fundamental role in the evolution of the universe.

Cordier hopes SVOM will be able to detect one or two similar events every year.

“The challenge is to get everything together in the chain” of observations which involves other telescopes, he said.

For example, after the burst was first detected in March, it took 17 hours before the Very Large Telescope in Chile turned its powerful lens towards the flash.

“During that time, the intensity had decreased,” Cordier said.

“If we get there earlier, then we’ll have better data.”

By Bénédicte Salvetat Rey

#Archeologists uncover intact section of ancient Jerusalem wall from Hanukkah era.


Last week, archeologists finished excavating the most complete part ever discovered of the foundations of the walls, which surrounded Jerusalem during the time of the Hasmonean Kingdom, when the story of Hanukkah took place.

In Hebrew, Hanukkah means “dedication,” and the holiday marks the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C., after a small group of Jewish fighters liberated it from occupying foreign forces, and the Hasmonean Kingdom that followed.

Jews celebrate the eight-day holiday, which this year begins on Dec. 14, with the ritual of lighting a nightly candle, in honour of the tiny supply of ritually pure oil that they found in the temple that lasted for eight nights instead of just one. Many also eat fried foods such as potato pancakes, called latkes, to memorialize this miraculously long-lasting oil.

The Hasmonean wall foundation, whose excavation was finished last week in Jerusalem, was likely built a few decades after the story of Hanukkah by the same rulers. It’s almost 50 metres (164 feet) long, around half the length of a football field, and around 5 metres (16 feet) wide. It held walls, which according to estimations and some historical writings, were taller than the current walls surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City.

Much of the current walls surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City date back hundreds of years to the Ottoman Era.

The Hasmonean walls encircled an area much larger than the current Old City of Jerusalem, with 60 watchtowers along the wall that were more than 10 metres (33 feet) tall, according to ancient writings. The part recently uncovered is one of the longest sections found intact from the foundation of the Hasmonean walls.
Separation wall and ceasefire

One of the most interesting aspects of the foundation was that the wall above it seems to have been purposefully and uniformly dismantled to a uniform height, not chaotically destroyed by the ravages of time or war, said Dr. Amit Re’em, one of the lead archeologists for the project from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Experts wondered why any leader would take apart a perfectly good security wall in an area that was constantly threatened by invasion.

In 132 or 133 B.C., Hellenistic King Antiochus the Seventh, an heir to the Antiochus the Fourth from the story of Hanukkah, laid siege to Jerusalem and the Judean Kingdom, according to ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.

As the Judean army struggled, Jewish king John Hyrcanus I decided to strike a deal with Antiochus. He raided King David’s tomb for 3,000 talents of silver and offered 500 hostages, including his own brother, according to the writings of Josephus.

“Antiochus Sidetes (the Seventh) reached a ceasefire agreement with John Hyrcanus, saying, if you want me to remove my army, you yourself, the Jewish king, must raze to the ground the Hasmonean fortification that you and your father built,” Re’em said Monday. Josephus’ writings state that after Antiochus accepted Hyrcanus’ deal, they “pulled down the walls encircling the city.”

“We just think that we found the archeological proof for it, so it’s pretty amazing, the archeology and the ancient stories combining together, this is the magic of Jerusalem,” Re’em said.

Another hypothesis Re’em posits is that King Herod built his palace over the Hasmonean wall foundations, during his reign in the first-century B.C., as a clear message of his sovereignty over Jewish Jerusalem.

Other archeologists were intrigued by why this section of the Hasmonean wall seems to have been dismantled.

Orit Peleg-Barkat, the head of classical archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes it likely had more to do with King Herod’s palace than the ceasefire deal with Antiochus.

Other sections of the Hasmonean wall uncovered in other parts of Jerusalem weren’t dismantled, so it could have just been one section that was dismantled, possibly to provide a foundation for Herod’s palace, Peleg-Barkat explained. Its unlikely that Jerusalem was left unprotected without any security walls for more than a century, she said.
Wall under a prison

The current section of the wall was uncovered underneath an abandoned wing of the building known as the Kishleh, which was built in 1830 as a military base. The wing was used as a prison, including by the British up until the 1940s, and the walls were covered with graffiti carved by prisoners in English, Hebrew and Arabic. The remnants of the iron bars of the cells are still visible in the ceiling.

Most of the building is still used by the Israeli police today, but one wing was abandoned and later transferred to the Tower of David Museum. Archeologists first began excavating this wing of the Kishleh in 1999, but violence in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, halted the excavations until two years ago.

Archeologists removed the equivalent of two Olympic swimming pools worth of dirt and debris by hand over the past two years from the hall. The excavations revealed what they believe are Middle Age-era dye pits, likely for fabric dying, and the long section of the Hasmonean wall foundation.

In the coming years, the Tower of David Museum will install a floating glass floor over the ruins and use the hall as one of its new galleries in the Schulich Wing of Archeology, Art and Innovation. The renovations of this section are expected to take at least two years, now that the archeological dig has concluded.

Melanie Lidman, The Associated Press

Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved, But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church, is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a non-profit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time.

Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves web pages.

The Wayback #Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.

For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.

Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.

It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all.

“We are here to try to provide a record of what happened, so that people can learn and build on that to build a better future, or to build new ideas that are worthy of being in the (Internet Archive’s) library,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.
The internet’s library

Kahle created the archive in 1996 when a year’s worth of saved pages could fit on about 2 terabytes worth of hard drives, the amount of storage you can get today in an iPhone. Now, the archive is saving closer to 150 terabytes, or hundreds of millions worth of web pages, per day.

Kahle is the driving force and personality behind the archive, with the exuberance and energy of your favourite science teacher and like an evangelist whose religion is libraries and technology. Sitting for an interview on the original wooden pews of the church, Kahle said he was inspired to purchase the building because it resembles the group’s logo. But more importantly, he said it’s a symbol of permanence and a reference to the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

“That was the first time somebody tried to go and collect everything ever written by humans,” Kahle said. “Of course, now that place is the internet, and the Internet Archive serves the whole internet as a library.”

The Wayback Machine tool does more than just screenshot the page. It also saves the technical architecture — the HTML, CSS, JavaScript codes and more — so that it can attempt to “replay the page as it existed” even if the server is no longer functioning, said Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham.

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results.

The Internet Archive team, which is made up of librarians and software engineers, are experimenting with ways to preserve how people get their news from chatbots by coming up with hundreds of questions and prompts each day based on the news, and recording both the queries and outputs, Graham said.

The group keeps copies of its archive in locations around the world in the event of a fire or flood that could damage its servers. But there are political considerations behind this approach, as well. The Trump administration has exerted pressure over content it disagrees with by filing lawsuits against media companies or by way of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Libraries are always targeted. The new guys often don’t like the old stuff around. So let’s design for it,” Kahle said. “Let’s go and live up to the moment and make it so that there’s different points of view stored and made permanently accessible in different environments.”

The Trump administration implemented a massive overhaul of government websites that included taking down countless pages on everything from health policies to the achievements of minority members of the military. It was the archive, which has been saving webpages during the transition of presidential administration websites since 2004, which enabled journalists to understand what had been altered.

“This change was huge. Whole sections of the web came down,” Kahle said. “(The administration) has a new point of view, and that’s why we have libraries to go and have the record.”
The people preserving the web

Most of the archive’s servers live in a large warehouse outside of San Francisco, although a set of servers have been symbolically placed in the main sanctuary of the former church. That placement is intentional, said Kahle. By displaying the servers, he hopes “that people understand that we’re all part of the collective protection for our knowledge.”

The headquarters is an homage to the work of the Internet Archive’s 200 staff members, which include engineers, librarians and archivists.

Archivists use bespoke machines to digitize books page by page, livestreaming their work on YouTube for all to see (alongside some lo-fi music). Record players churn out vintage tunes from 1920s and 1940s, and the building houses every type of media console for any type of content imaginable, from microfilm, to CDs and satellite television. (The Internet Archive preserves music, television, books and video games, too).

The former church’s main sanctuary also boasts more than 100 three-foot statues of employees who have been on staff for at least three years – a reference to the famous Chinese terracotta army from thousands of years ago.

In some ways, the space captures the quirkiness -— and community — of the internet itself.

“There are a lot of people that are just passionate about the cause. There’s a cyberpunk atmosphere,” Annie Rauwerda, a Wikipedia editor and social media influencer, said at a party thrown at the Internet Archive’s headquarters to celebrate reaching a trillion pages “The internet (feels) quite corporate when I use it a lot these days, but you wouldn’t know from the people here.”

The headquarters might feel something like a living history exhibit. But the Internet Archive’s goal, says Kahle, is to preserve the web so that it can continue to have a future, not to be the arbiters of truth.

“It’s not a presentation. It’s not a museum that has a story,” he said. “It’s trying to be a resource to make it so that other people can come up with their own ideas.”

A footprint fossil from long before dinosaurs roamed is raising big questions on P.E.I.

It dates back about 290 million years, to the Permian Period. But researchers say the animal they think likely left it has no fossil record that early, suggesting this may be the oldest known example and could shift the evolutionary timeline back.

“I was dumbfounded,” said Patrick Brunet, a self-taught citizen scientist who found the fossil along the shore of Hillsborough Bay.

For five years, Brunet has combed the Island, checking places that usually produce finds. On an eventful day six months ago, at a spot that had never delivered, he found the biggest footprint he’s ever seen. About 25 centimetres wide, it’s larger than many tracks from that period.

“That’s the mystery and that’s the big question and that’s what going to be studied,” Brunet said.

Island investigators will make the case that it is Pachypes, a type of track typically linked to Pareiasaurus, stocky, plant-eating reptiles. That’s where the timeline gets tricky.

“The only Cinderella that fits this particular slipper, didn’t appear in the fossil record for another 30 to 40 million years,” said John Calder, an advisor to the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation, and also to Parks Canada.

Calder explains the creatures alive during the Permian Period were usually smaller - cat- or dog-sized, lizard-like animals. But this footprint is about the size of a dinner plate. If they’re right about it being a Pareiasaurus, that means they were walking the Earth much earlier than experts thought.

“And that means that they had to evolve from something else earlier than we thought,” Calder said. “It changes our drawing of the tree of life.”

A team of international scientists, including Calder and Brunet, will continue working to confirm what’s behind the print. The team will soon start drafting a paper to put their case through scientific review. They’ve already consulted colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

Brunet said he plans to go back to the area, and to keep searching other sites for more evidence to support the find.

“We have one spectacular footprint, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t find more.”

Calder said it’s part of his job to answer inquiries from Islanders who find interesting rocks. Sometimes it is not a fossil. Sometimes it is. It’s important to present them to experts, he adds, or a piece of history could end up as someone’s doorstop.

“We’re constantly unearthing, literally, the record of life on the planet before us, and everybody can make a contribution. That’s really cool.”

The exact spot where the fossil was found is being kept secret for its protection. It’s the latest in a wave of prehistoric finds putting P.E.I. on the paleontology map. The Island’s red rocks hold the best record in Canada for the Permian Period, according to the provincial government.

A 2,000-Year-Old Sarcophagus Was Just Unsealed—and the Mummy Inside is Mind-Blowing
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Experts working in the Tomb of Cerberus in Giugliano, an area in Naples, unsealed a 2,000-year-old sarcophagus.
Inside they found the remains of a shockingly well-preserved body lying face-up and covered in a shroud.
Ongoing analysis of the contents of the sarcophagus could yield new social, cultural, and scientific insight into ancient life.

“The Tomb of Cerberus continues to provide valuable information on the Phlegraean territory near Liternum,” Marian Nuzzo, a superintendent with the Italian Ministry of Culture, said in a statement, “expanding knowledge of the past, and offering opportunities for research of a multidisciplinary nature.”

The team now has a new treasure trove of information to mine. “In recent months,” Nuzzo said, “laboratory analyses conducted on samples taken from the burials and depositional beds have returned a considerable amount of data regarding the treatment of the body of the deceased and the funerary rituals implanted, considerably enriching the panorama of our knowledge.”

A skull unearthed in #China challenges the timeline of human evolution, scientists say.

A badly crushed cranium unearthed decades ago from a riverbank in central China that once defied classification is now shaking up the human family tree, according to a new analysis.

Scientists digitally reconstructed the squashed skull, thought to be 1 million years old, and its features suggest that the fossil belonged to the same lineage as a striking specimen called “Dragon Man” and the Denisovans — an enigmatic and recently discovered population of prehistoric humans with murky origins. The skull’s age and categorization as an early Denisovan ancestor would mean the group originated much earlier than thought.

The researchers’ wider analysis, based on the reconstruction and more than 100 other skull fossils, has also sketched a radically different picture of human evolution, they reported Thursday in the journal Science. The results significantly shift the timeline for species such as our own, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals, archaic humans who lived in Europe and Central Asia before disappearing around 40,000 years ago, are known to have lived alongside the Denisovans and interbred with them.

“This changes a lot of thinking because 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,” said study coauthor Chris Stringer, paleoanthropologist and research leader in human evolution at London’s Natural History Museum, in an email.

The findings, if widely accepted, would push back the emergence of our own species by 400,000 years and dramatically reshape what’s known about human origins.
Tangled ancestry

The skull is one of two partially mineralized specimens unearthed in 1989 and 1990 in an area known as Yunxian in Shiyan, located in Hubei province in central China. A third skull discovered nearby in 2022 hasn’t yet been formally described in the scientific literature, Stringer noted.

“We decided to study this fossil again because it has reliable geological dating and is one of the few million-year-old human fossils,” said the study’s first author Xiaobo Feng, a professor at Shanxi University in China, in a statement. “A fossil of this age is critical for rebuilding our family tree.”

Both of the Yunxian skulls were deformed from millennia spent underground, but the second, known as Yunxian 2, was better preserved. That specimen formed the basis of the new reconstruction, which used cutting-edge CT scanning, light imaging and virtual techniques to separate the bones from the rock matrix that encased them, and to correct the distortions inherent in the fossil.

The skull’s age, determined by dating the layer of sediment in which it was found and mammal fossils found in the same layer, had led some experts to believe that it belonged to Homo erectus, a more primitive human species known to have lived in many places around the world at that point in time. However, while Yunxian 2’s large, squat braincase did resemble that of Homo erectus, other features of the skull, such as flat and shallow cheekbones, did not.

Stringer and his colleagues concluded that Yunxian 2 belonged to an early ancestor of Dragon Man, formally called Homo longi. Scientists identified Dragon Man in 2021 from a skull found at the bottom of a well in northeastern China, and authors of a June study used ancient DNA to link Homo longi to the Denisovans, a shadowy population known from genetic information extracted from a few fossil fragments but thought to have lived across much of Asia.

The latest analysis also suggests other hard-to-classify fossils uncovered in China should be grouped with Homo longi and the Denisovans — including fossils that another research team recently proposed as a newfound species they called Homo juluensis, a name that roughly translates to huge-headed man.

Stringer said the third Yunxian skull fossil, once researchers prepare and study it in detail, will enable the team to test the accuracy of the reconstruction and its placement within the human family tree.
Rewriting history

With telltale bumps and ridges, skulls are particularly informative in the study of human evolution because they have a lot of characteristic features, and a skull is typically the specimen that can definitively confirm a newly discovered species.

Using information from the new digital reconstruction and anatomical information from 104 skulls and jawbones in the human fossil record, Stringer and his coauthor Xijun Ni, professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, reconstructed the evolutionary relationships between different groups using a mathematical program used in evolutionary biology. The team pieced together what’s known as a phylogenetic tree showing how different human species may have diverged from one another over the past 1 million years.

The analysis suggests that the origins of Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals are much older than previously thought.

The finding challenges the traditional view, based on studies of ancient DNA, that the three species began to diverge from a common ancestor around 700,000 to 500,000 years ago — although it has never been clear who this ancestral species, sometimes dubbed Ancestor X, was.

The Denisovans and modern humans last shared a common ancestor about 1.32 million years ago, according to the new analysis. The Neanderthals branched away from that evolutionary line earlier, around 1.38 million years ago, the study suggested. The findings mean that Denisovans are more closely related to us than the Neanderthals, which had been viewed by many as Homo sapiens’ closest sister species, the researchers wrote.

The reconstruction of the warped skull looked good, said Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. McRae, who was not involved in the research, agreed it fit with Homo longi and the Denisovans.

However, McRae is less convinced by the phylogenetic tree analysis and said the team may have tried “to do too much at once with limited data.”

“This study says that Denisovans (Homo longi) and Homo sapiens are more closely related to the exclusion of Neanderthals,” he explained. “It also goes one step further saying that the origins of all these groups is much older than expected, about twice as old if not more. This would place the origins of all these groups firmly in the time of Homo erectus.

“At this point in time, I think the safer thing to say is that the Homo longi/Denisovan group and Homo sapiens (including very archaic fossils and modern humans both) look more similar to each other than they do to Neanderthals,” he added via email.

If the timing pointed out in this paper is accurate, McRae said the only candidate for the common ancestor of the Homo sapiens, Homo longi and Homo neanderthalensis would be Homo erectus. “There really isn’t another known species from the ~1.5 million year old time period that would make sense,” McRae said.

The human species Homo antecessor is known to have lived around 1 million years ago, and another, Homo heidelbergensis about 700,000 years ago, he added.

Stringer said he anticipated the findings would attract some skepticism, and the researchers plan to extend their analyses to include further sources of data and other fossils, including more from Africa, to refine the picture.

The study raises a broader question about where the ancestral populations of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Homo longi lived: inside or outside Africa, which is widely regarded as the cradle of humankind, Stringer noted.

The authors said that while the study makes some progress toward resolving what paleoanthropologists call the “muddle in the middle” — the confusing array of human specimens in the fossil record between 1 million and 300,000 years ago — finds like the Yunxian 2 skull also underscore just how much scientists have to learn about human origins.

“When I began working in human evolution over fifty years ago the East Asian record was either marginalised, or its fossils were only ever considered as direct ancestors of recent East Asians,” Stringer said by email. “But what we now see from Yunxian — and from … many other sites — is that East Asia preserves crucial clues to the later stages of human evolution.”

By Katie Hunt, CNN