Another look at the ~160,000-year-old early modern human cranium from Herto, Ethiopia

What is it about?

A ~160,000-year-old fossil modern human cranium was discovered near the village of Herto, Ethiopia in 2003. The original publication assigned this specimen to a new subspecies of our species, Homo sapiens idaltu. In this paper, we used a variety of bivariate and multivariate analyses to show that the more complete of the two crania, BOU-VP-16/1, looks very much like other large early modern human crania and therefore does not merit subspecies distinction.

Featured Image