An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin found before.

Working alongside researchers from China’s Xi’an Jiaotong University, the UK’s University of York, and Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, researchers at CAS think they have uncovered an entirely new lineage – a hybrid between the branch that gave us modern humans and the branch that gave us other ancient hominins in the region, like Denisovans.