Ancient skull could prove human species is a lot older: study

We were a- head of our time.

A reconstruction of a one-million-year-old skull suggested that our species started to emerge hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, according to a brainy new study published in the journal Science.

“From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?” said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis, the BBC reported.

Dubbed Yunxian 2 skull, the ancient cranium was reportedly exhumed in 1990 from an archaeological repository in Hubei province in central China, Livescience reported. 3

For decades, researchers thought that the primeval noggin belonged to Homo Erectus, the first large-brained humans, because it dated back a million years —