The wonderful ruins of Sanxingdui

Before this year, the site had already revealed incredible artefacts from what experts believe was the Shu civilisation. These bronze-age people had been a myth before the discovery of Sanxingdui.

Finding the ‘Dragon Man’

Scientists think the species’ brain would have been the same size as Homo sapiens, but the skull has larger eye sockets, a thick mouth and overgrown teeth.

Regardless, the skull does provide a lot of evidence that the development of modern humans was not a simple linear evolutionary path but likely involved significant crossbreeding between the species.

Descendants of a primitive Asian population

The paper dispelled theories that they had migrated from Afghanistan, Siberia and central Asian mountains. The mummies were excavated between 1979 and 2017.

Will we find dinosaur DNA soon?

The nucleus contained “fossilised threads of chromatin”, raising the tantalising possibility that palaeontologists could one day find the remains of dinosaur DNA.

Before this study, palaeontologists had believed that it would be improbable to find fossilised dinosaur DNA because it is too fragile to survive for hundreds of millions of years.

Finding the possible source of the world’s first coins

While the mint itself is long gone, the team found a pit filled with the industrial waste produced by coin production.

If correct, the discovery would mean people began producing coins about a century before initially thought. Currently, the world’s oldest mint was found in the Kingdom of Lydia in what is now western Turkey.

The mint in Lydia is thought to have run sometime between 619BC and 560BC, while the one discovered in central China’s Henan province is estimated to have begun operating between 640BC and 550BC.

Do the Turkish and Japanese languages share a common ancestor?

The scientists said genetic, archaeological and linguistic analysis points to the fact that the five Transeurasian languages – Mongolian, Turkish, Tungusic, Japanese and Korean – originated in millet farmers in the Liao valley.

However, the relationship between Transeurasian languages is a source of intense debate, and many scientists hesitate to include Japanese and Korean in the language family.

A bird, oh wait, dinosaur, in an egg

It is widely accepted that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, but the recent discovery of a fossilised embryo solidified the theory.

The team wrote that this characteristic, called tucking, suggests a strong connection between birds and theropods, the group of dinosaurs that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex.

The fossil is between 66 and 72 million years old and was found in southeastern China.

Rediscovering an emperor

For nearly 1,000 years, Chinese people had believed Emperor Wen, the fifth ruler of the Han dynasty, was buried somewhere in a mountain named the Phoenix’s Mouth outside Xian. It turned out that the actual tomb lay a few kilometres away.

Called Emperor Wen’s Ba Mausoleum, the pyramid-shaped resting place had long been covered by the shifting environment over the centuries, making it hard to pinpoint as a unique archaeological site.

The site started to receive attention when artefacts discovered in the area were of exceptionally high quality for the time.

Emperor Wen is well-received in Chinese history and is considered a leader who oversaw a period of stability and economic growth.