The study published on Wednesday involved the so-called Broken Hill skull, also called the Kabwe skull in recognition of a nearby town, discovered by a Swiss miner working in the Broken Hill lead and zinc mine in what was then northern Rhodesia. This indicates the species represented by the skull was unlikely to have been a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens as some had thought. Most scientists now assign it to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which inhabited parts of Africa and Europe starting about 600,000 years ago. The Broken Hill skull, Homo heidelbergensis, a fossil of an extinct human species found in Zambia in 1921, is seen in this undated image taken at the Natural History Museum in London. "Also, the latest research suggests that the facial shape of Homo heidelbergensis fossils does not fit an ancestral pattern for our species."

Source: CBC News April 02, 2020 12:00 UTC