Skull fossil may offer key clues to human origins

Archaeologists and paleontologists recently discovered a roughly 1-million-year-old human skull fossil in Central China’s Hubei province, possibly offering a monumental clue in the study of the evolution of Homo erectus, according to a news conference of the National Cultural Heritage Administration in Beijing on Wednesday.

The well-preserved fossil was found on May 18 in an excavation site known as Xuetangliangzi in the city of Shiyan’s Yunyang district. Sediment samples have been extracted for laboratory analysis to assist in dating the fossil, according to Gao Xing, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

The skull has not been fully excavated from the ground yet, but the part that has been exposed so far, including the frontal bone, eye sockets and left cheekbone and temporal bone, indicates that the skull’s structure is intact.

“No obvious deformation has been found. It is in very good condition and features the typical characteristics of Homo erectus,” Gao said, referring to an extinct species of the human genus that is perhaps an ancestor of modern humans.

The Xuetangliangzi site is famous for a milestone discovery of two hominid crania, in 1989 and 1990. The two fossils, dating to from 800,000 to 1.1 million years ago, were named by scientists the No 1 and No 2 skulls of Yunxian Man (Yunyang district was then known as Yunxian county). However, when unearthed, the two fossils were found to be severely deformed.

Consequently, the finding of an apparently intact cranium — named the No 3 skull of Yunxian Man — has been met with excitement and a new round of research on the Xuetangliangzi site.

The ongoing excavation was jointly launched last year by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and the Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

According to Gao, the No 3 skull was buried about 62 centimeters below the current ground surface and was about 35 meters away from the previous two.

“Their buried environments are similar, and so are the varieties of other unearthed animal bones and lithic (stone) tools,” he said. “Preliminary studies showed that the No 3 skull should belong to the same period of time as the No 1 and No 2.”

If so, the finding could be the best-preserved skull fossil of Homo erectus from around 1 million years ago ever found in the hinterland of the Eurasian region, the researcher said.

However, Gao told China Daily, a dating process is still underway.

change, war and food insecurity — that conspire to make social and economic stability a thing of the past. Simply put, the world is not prepared.

In any kind of crisis, the top priority should be to protect those who are most at risk. But as COVID-19 and climate change have demonstrated, the most vulnerable among us are often the first to be affected. And if adequate protection mechanisms are not introduced before a crisis strikes, the world’s poorest countries will most likely be the last to receive help.

The pandemic is a case in point. Instead of crafting an equitable global response in advance, leaders had to scramble to ensure that lower-income countries could get access to vaccines.

Despite immense challenges, the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access facility, or COVAX, has been remarkably successful. So far, COVAX has delivered more than 1.75 billion vaccine doses to 146 countries. Of these, 1.5 billion went to 92 low-income countries. By January, COVAX had helped lower-income countries to achieve an average vaccination rate of 20 percent, enough to protect the most at-risk groups.

But the next time we face a global crisis, we must act faster and more decisively. Crucially, any potential protection mechanism must be fully funded, or at least have pre-approved contingent funding in place, so that lowerincome countries have immediate access to lifesaving countermeasures. But developing an adequate global response also requires a change in mindset. Even now, as G20 leaders map out how to prepare for future pandemics, there are no detailed proposals that address how the world’s poorest economies will obtain vaccines.

Fortunately, COVAX itself provides a useful model for how to design future protection mechanisms. By treating the protection of the world’s most vulnerable as its primary objective, COVAX has helped ensure that 63 percent of older people and 75 percent of healthcare workers in lower-income countries are fully vaccinated. Although the rollout could have been faster, the fact that 76 percent of the vaccine doses delivered to low-income countries have come through COVAX shows that hundreds of millions would have suffered without it.

But if COVAX had been created and fully funded before the pandemic, its impact could have been even greater. COVAX worked because it was built on global health networks that were already in place and had the resources, expertise and infrastructure to mount a rapid global effort. But that effort stretched these agencies to the limit. If these organizations had built-in surge capacity and contingency funding, the response could have been faster and more efficient.

The willingness to take risks is critical. With COVAX, officials secured billions of vaccine doses without knowing if those vaccines would work or how many doses would be needed. But the economic, social and political repercussions of allowing millions of people to get sick or be displaced would have been far more costly.

Even though the COVAX model is not a one-size-fits-all solution for future calamities, it does offer useful lessons that could apply to crises beyond public health. For example, private-sector actors are exploring a Climate Advance Market Commitment that would promote and invest in climate solutions, based on COVAX’s innovative financing mechanism.

Whatever policies we put in place to prepare for future global crises, we must do so quickly. Whether we like it or not, the next disaster is only a matter of time. Preparing for it must be our new normal.

The author, a former president of the European Commission and former prime minister of Portugal, is chair of the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.