Hey, this is Flor Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, New Skull just dropped.

An ancient hominid fossil from China is shaking up the human origins field.

This is really a case where if you have another piece of evidence, it might be a good time to sort of show people.

A new analysis of a very old skull challenges what we thought we knew about our ancestral

family tree and its timeline, at least according to the researchers who wrote the paper.

The study in the journal

science claims that Homo sapiens and some of our relatives could have emerged at least a half a

million years earlier than we thought. But as we know, big claims require big evidence. So here

to piece together the details is Dr. John Hawkes, an anthropologist and professor at the University

of Wisconsin-Madison.

He studies the bones and genes of ancient humans.

John, welcome back to Science Friday.

Hey, thanks for having me.

First of all, is it drama in your field right now?

You know, look, I'm a field that's got a lot of drama in it, but I will say that this is a really

astounding claim and one that has, you know, drawn a lot of attention to the question of whether

we know as much as we thought we did about our recent past. Okay, let's talk about the study.

I know it centers on this very crushed up skull. Tell us about it.

Yes. So this site in central China, widely known as a Yunshan site, is a site where in 1982, partial skulls were found.

And they were both highly crushed. That makes them tough for us to study, obviously, but they have features that

connect them with an early species in our ancestry known as Homo erectus. The new study has

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