A skull which helped shape the understanding of human evolution when the fossil was first discovered almost a century ago has finally been dated by scientists. The so-called Broken Hill skull belongs to the ancient human ancestor Homo heidelbergensis and is believed to be 300,000 years old. Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London said: 'Through years of painstaking work including direct dating of the skull itself and other materials found around the Broken Hill site, I, geochronologist Rainer Grün, and other colleagues have produced a best age estimate of about 299,000 years for the Broken Hill skull. Most scientists now assign it to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which inhabited parts of Africa and Europe starting about 600,000 years ago. 'Also, the latest research suggests that the facial shape of Homo heidelbergensis fossils does not fit an ancestral pattern for our species.'

Source: Daily Mail April 01, 2020 16:34 UTC