Researchers have virtually reconstructed a crushed and distorted 1 million-year-old human skull discovered in China. The newly restored cranium may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious Denisovans and provides clues to the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens in Asia.

In a study published Thursday (Sept. 25) in the journal Science, researchers presented their reconstruction of the Yunxian 2 skull, which was excavated in 1990 from an archaeological site in Hubei province in central China.

Although experts thought for decades that the Yunxian skull was from the human ancestor Homo erectus, the new analysis revealed the skull is more closely related to "Dragon Man," an extinct species first described after the discovery of a different skull in northeastern China in 2021, and to Denisovans, a mysterious group of humans that went extinct around 30,000 years ago.

Based on statistical data from 57 fossil skulls, the researchers estimated that the Neanderthal clade diverged from a common human ancestor first, around 1.38 million years ago. Then, the H. longi clade diverged around 1.2 million years ago, followed by H. sapiens around 1.02 million years ago. (The earliest clear fossil evidence of H. sapiens, however, comes from 300,000-year-old bones from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.) This short timeframe suggests that rapid diversification took place in all three human groups.