Dali (fossil)

The Dali Skull, or Dali Man, is a nearly complete fossilized skull of a representative of the genus Homo which lived sometime during the Late Middle Pleistocene period. It was discovered by Shuntang Liu in 1978 in Dali County in the Shaanxi Province of China

Although dating has been a subject of debate, the fossil is estimated to be about 209,000 years old, and is considered to be the most complete skull of that time period found in China. The Dali cranium is currently housed in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China.

Classifying the fossil
There has been considerable debate regarding how to classify the fossil in terms of species, with some anthropologists insisting it to be a regional variant of Homo heidelbergensis and others categorizing it as an early representative of Homo sapiens. The Dali cranium is interesting to modern anthropologists as it is possibly an ideal specimen of an archaic Homo sapiens. It has a mixture of traits from both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, with similarities including the sagittal crest and relatively heavy brow ridges common to the former and the delicate cheek bones, flattened nasal bones, and cranial capacity (smaller than but similar to modern humans at 1,120 cc3) characteristic of the latter.

Characteristics of the Dali fossil
The mixed characteristics of the Dali fossil have caused much controversy in the field of paleoanthropology, and as such there is no current consensus on the species status of the Dali fossil. Some anthropologists, notably many Chinese representatives, cite the characteristics of the Dali cranium and other similar Chinese fossils of that era as evidence for genetic continuity in modern H. sapiens today, as Dali's traits are commonly found in modern Chinese H. sapiens populations. In turn, it is often argued that modern Chinese humans did not evolve in Africa, but instead evolved in China from a separate lineage of H. erectus. This position is consistent with the "Multiregional hypothesis," which states that different human populations across the planet had evolved with current racial characteristics in separate environments, and is contrary to the popular "Recent single-origin hypothesis," which asserts that modern H. sapiens evolved solely in Africa and spread throughout the planet during a recent exodus.