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The Petralona skull is a mysterious and important piece in the human evolution puzzle. This image is a reconstruction depicting the skull attached to a cave wall. | Credit: By Nadina, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link<\/p>\n
A mysterious skull with a stalagmite growing out of its head is about 300,000 years old and neither human nor Neanderthal<\/a>, a new study finds.<\/p>\n The skull was reportedly discovered attached to the wall of Petralona Cave in northern Greece in 1960. Researchers have since argued about its position on the human family tree<\/a> and had trouble figuring out its age \u2014 until now.<\/p>\n In the new study, published online Aug. 14 in the Journal of Human Evolution<\/a>, researchers dated calcite (a mineral form of calcium carbonate often found in caves) protruding out of the skull to find that it was at least 277,000 years old. They don’t know precisely how long the skull was in the cave before it began acquiring calcite, but the new estimate helps narrow down previous attempts to date the skull, which have ranged from 170,000 to 700,000 years old.<\/p>\n The findings support previous suggestions that the Petralona individual lived in Pleistocene<\/a>-era Europe alongside Neanderthals, but was part of a different human group, broadly called Homo heidelbergensis<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Petralona fossil is distinct from H. sapiens and Neanderthals, study co-author Chris Stringer<\/a>, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science, “and the new age estimate supports the persistence and coexistence of this population alongside the evolving Neanderthal lineage in the later Middle Pleistocene of Europe”.<\/p>\n Related: ‘It makes no sense to say there was only one origin of Homo sapiens’: How the evolutionary record of Asia is complicating what we know about our species<\/a><\/p>\n The Petralona skull, sometimes called the “Petralona Man,” was almost certainly male based on the fossil’s size and robustness, according to Stringer. He also said that the skull’s teeth had moderate wear, so it likely belonged to a young adult.<\/p>\n While records of the skull’s discovery are poor, Stringer noted that there’s evidence to support the idea that it was stuck to the wall by calcite encrustations \u2014 the same kind that were protruding out of the skull.<\/p>\n To estimate the age of the calcite, researchers used a method called uranium-series dating<\/a>. Calcite contains a small amount of uranium<\/a>, which decays into another radioactive element called thorium over a fixed period. This fixed rate of decay means that researchers can calculate ages based on the calcite\u2019s ratio of uranium to thorium. The skull calcite dates back to around 286,000 years ago, with a high degree of confidence that it’s at least 277,000 years old.<\/p>\n RELATED STORIES<\/p>\n \u2014300,000-year-old footprints reveal extinct humans went on a lakeside family outing among giant elephants and rhinos<\/a><\/p>\n \u20142.6 million-year-old stone tools reveal ancient human relatives were ‘forward planning’ 600,000 years earlier than thought<\/a><\/p>\n