Is the “million-year-old” skull from China a Denisovan or something else?
A fossil skull from China that made headlines last week may or may not be a million years old, but it's probably closely related to Denisovans. The fossil skull, dubbed Yunxian 2, is one of three unearthed from a terrace alongside the Han River, in central China, in a layer of river sediment somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million years old. Archaeologists originally identified them as Homo erectus, but Hanjiang Normal University paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng and his colleagues’ recent digita