Million-year-old skull challenges history of human evolution

Updated Sep 28, 2025, 1:12pm PDT

An artist’s impression of H. longi based on a digital reconstruction of the fossilized skull. Jiannan Bai and Xijun Ni/Handout via Reuters

A million-year-old skull discovered in China could rewrite the history of human evolution.

A new analysis of the skull published in Science suggests that our species may have emerged half a million years earlier than we thought. If so, then that also means we co-existed with Neanderthals for far longer than previously believed.

The skull appears to have belonged to an early hominin species called Homo longi, which genetic evidence indicates lived alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. If H. longi was around a million years ago, the researchers argued, then early H. sapiens likely was, too.

Paleoanthropology is notoriously contentious, and other experts in the field told the BBC that while the theory is plausible, it needs more evidence to be confirmed.

— Claire Cameron