200,000-year-old skull

An ancient argument may have resulted in someone cracking the head of an ancient early human called the Maba Man. A healed lesion on this 200,000-year-old skull may have come from violent trauma, though not bad enough to have killed him.


"People are social mammals, we do these kinds of things to each other," study researcher Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience, referring to interpersonal aggression. "It's another case of long-term survival of a pretty serious injury."

The Maba Man skull pieces were found in June 1958 in a cave in Lion Rock, near the town of Maba, in Guangdong province, China. They consist of some face bones and parts of the brain case. From those fragments, researchers were able to determine that this was a pre-modern human, perhaps an archaic human. He (or she, since researchers can't tell the sex from the skull bones) would have lived about 200,000 years ago, according to Trinkaus.


Decades after the skull bones were discovered, researcher Xiu-Jie Wu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences took a close look at the strange formations on the left side of the forehead, using computed tomography (CT) scans and high-resolution photography. The skull has a small depression, about half an inch long and circular in nature. On the other side of the bone from this indentation, the skull bulges inward into the brain cavity.
After deciding against any other possible cause of the bump, including genetic abnormalities, diseases and infections, they were left with the idea that Maba somehow hit his head. The certainties stop there, though. The researchers suggest that all they really know is the ancient human suffered a blow to the head.

"What becomes much more speculative is what ultimately caused it," Trinkaus said. "Did they get in an argument with someone else, and they picked something up and hit them over the head?"