A 300,000-year-old jawbone from China refuses to fit neatly into the human family tree — and a reconstructed million-year-old skull is now suggesting our major ancestral branches split hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought

A 300,000-year-old jawbone from China refuses to fit neatly into the human family tree — and a reconstructed million-year-old skull is now suggesting our major ancestral branches split hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought

Somewhere in a Beijing collection sits a fragment of a child’s lower jaw that has spent the past three years quietly annoying everyone who studies human origins. It surfaced at Hualongdong, a collapsed cave in Anhui province in eastern China, alongside the remains of around 16 people who died roughly 300,000 years ago. The jaw […]