ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Recent micro-CT scans of a 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed in Northern China in the 1970s have revealed the interior configuration of a temporal bone thought only to occur in Neanderthals. In fact, this arrangement of the inner ear has been used to classify skulls as Neanderthal since the mid-1990s. The other human teeth and bone fragments found with the skull, known as Xujiayao 15, all resemble an early, non-Neanderthal form of late archaic humans. And so, Erik Trinkaus of Washington University; Xiu-Jie Wu, Wu Liu, and Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing; and Isabelle Crevecoeur of PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, expected the scan to reveal an inner ear formation resembling that found in modern humans. “We were completely surprised….This discovery places into question whether this arrangement of the semicircular canals is truly unique to the Neanderthals,” Trinkaus told Science Daily. “The study of human evolution has always been messy, and these findings just make it all the messier. It shows that human populations in the real world don’t act in nice, simple patterns.”
