This 300,000-year-old skull may be from an African ‘ghost’ population
The Broken Hill fossil’s age suggests the hominid lived at the same time as Homo sapiens
By Bruce Bower
A mysterious but well-preserved hominid skull found nearly a century ago comes from a population that lived in Africa around 300,000 years ago, as the earliest Homo sapiens were evolving, a new study finds.
This discovery indicates that a separate Homo population, perhaps a species some researchers call H. heidelbergensis (SN: 6/22/19), inhabited Africa at the same time as both H. sapiens and a recently discovered population dubbed H. naledi (SN: 6/10/17), say geochronologist Rainer Grün and his colleagues. African H. heidelbergensis could have been a recently reported “ghost population” (SN: 3/14/20) that interbred with ancient H. sapiens and passed a small amount of DNA to present-day West Africans, the researchers suggest April 1 in Nature.
“We can now identify at least three distinct and contemporary [Homo] lineages in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but we don’t yet know whether our ancestry was largely or entirely contained within the H. sapiens part of that variation,” says paleoanthropologist and study coauthor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
Researchers have puzzled over the age of the Broken Hill skull since its 1921 discovery in south-central Africa. Metal ore mining at what was then Northern Rhodesia’s Broken Hill mine revealed deposits bearing the skull and two associated leg fossils. The site, located in what’s now known as Zambia, has been named Kabwe. Previous age estimates for the fossils, based on clues such rodent fossils and stone tools found at the site, have ranged widely from around 500,000 to 125,000 years old.