Two Chinese Fossils May Push Back the Origin of Homo Sapiens by 400,000 Years

Two fossil studies from China are complicating the timeline for when modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged, according to separate papers. A team led by Xiujie Wu of Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology examined a child's jawbone found at Hualongdong in Anhui province, alongside the remains of about 16 people who died roughly 300,000 years ago, and published the analysis in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The jawbone belongs to a partial skull named HLD 6, from a child of about 12 or 13. Compared against 83 other fossil hominins and living humans, it showed a mix of features: a heavy, archaic jaw alongside a slimmer, more modern hinge and faint hints of a chin that never fully forms — a trait unique to Homo sapiens, absent in Neanderthals and Denisovans. Co-author María Martinón-Torres of Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution told CNN that HLD 6's weak chin traits resemble those of Morocco's Jebel Irhoud fossils, usually read as early Homo sapiens. The team stopped short of naming a new species.

A second, larger claim concerns Yunxian 2, a skull recovered in 1990 near the Hanjiang river in Hubei province and dated to between 0.94 and 1.10 million years old, long classified as Homo erectus by default. A team led by Xijun Ni of Fudan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, digitally reconstructed it using CT and structured-light scanning and, writing in Science in September 2025, placed it in the "longi clade," a group thought to include the Denisovans as the sister lineage to Homo sapiens. That would push the origin of Homo sapiens back by about 400,000 years, to just over a million years ago, with the sapiens lineage splitting from the longi/Denisovan lineage around 1.32 million years ago, versus previous genetic estimates of roughly 600,000 years.

Ni acknowledged the fossil is too old to yield usable genetic data, and protein testing on animal bones from the site also failed, leaving the classification resting on comparative anatomy and phylogenetic modelling alone. Andy Herries of Australia's La Trobe University, who was not involved, called the longi classification "unwarranted given all the uncertainties" in comments to ABC Science.