A mysterious 300,000 year-old skull was found decades ago attached to the wall of a cave in northern Greece. As archaeologists continued studying the fossil, they discovered a shocking development— the skull is neither human nor Neanderthal.
The skull was found in the Petralona Cave in Greece in 1960. It has a stalagmite growing out of its head, which has since sparked confusion among researchers, who had trouble figuring out its position on the human family tree, until now.
According to baffled scientists, the skull isn’t Homo sapiens, nor is it Neanderthal. Instead, they believe it could belong to a separate species of human ancestor that lived alongside Neanderthals during the Pleistocene epoch in Europe, named Homo heidelbergensis.
“This fossil has a key position in European human evolution,” the researchers wrote.
The stalagmites that were found sticking out of the skull grow slowly as water drips down from the cave ceiling, gaining a millimeter every few years. Researchers were also able to determine that the calcite (a mineral form of calcium carbonate often found in caves) dripping from the skull was at least 277,000 years old.
It remains unclear how long the fossil remained in the cave, amassing the stalagmite, but researchers were reportedly able to narrow the window from the previous range of between 170,000 and 700,000 years old.
According to the study, the Petralona skull was almost certainly male based on the fossil’s size and robustness, which is why it has repeatedly been referred to as the “Petralona man.”
The skull’s teeth only had moderate wear, so it likely belonged to a young adult, Chris Stringer, a paleonanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science.
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The skull was originally found by a local villager, Christos Sariannidis, back in 1960, who said it was simply hanging to the wall of a cave chamber. Scientists later determined it was fused to the wall by the gradual accumulation of calcite.
“The new age estimate supports the persistence and coexistence of this population alongside the evolving Neanderthal lineage in the later Middle Pleistocene of Europe,” Stringer said.
It is not yet definitive that the skull belonged to the Homo heidelbergensis, but researchers say that could be confirmed in a later study.
The Homo heidelbergensis lived between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago, evolving in Africa but by 500,000 years ago some populations were situated in Europe.