A Neanderthal Marco Polo? The prehistoric Chinese skull with intriguing signs of a European past
Researchers from China and Spain find a surprising combination of features in an ancient discovery in Guangdong
In the throes of the Great Leap Forward, farmers in a remote Guangdong township discovered local links with a long-buried European past.
The farmers in Maba township were shovelling sediment from hillside limestone caves in their search for phosphorus to use as fertiliser on their crops in 1958.
The caves had long been a source of phosphorus-rich animal bones and they would grind the material into a powder and heat it in ovens to later spread over the fields.
There is room to think about an unknown Euro-Asian evolutionary process
As they dug into the sediment, load after load, one of the farmers spotted something that looked like a human skull.
Palaeoanthropologists later pieced it together with more fragments found at the site to form much of the skull of a early human that lived in southern China more than 130,000 years ago.
The Maba specimen was neither the oldest nor the best preserved early human remains found in China, but something set it apart: it had a “European” face with distinct featuresthat resembled those of a Neanderthal, a human species that roamed Europe before modern humans arrived from Africa.