The cranium from Broken Hill (Kabwe) was recovered from cave deposits in 1921, during metal ore mining in what is now Zambia¹. It is one of the best-preserved skulls of a fossil hominin, and was initially designated as the type specimen of Homo rhodesiensis, but recently it has often been included in the taxon Homo heidelbergensis^2,3,4. However, the original site has since been completely quarried away, and—although the cranium is often estimated to be around 500 thousand years old^5,6,7—its unsystematic recovery impedes its accurate dating and placement in human evolution. Here we carried out analyses directly on the skull and found a best age estimate of 299 ± 25 thousand years (mean ± 2σ). The result suggests that later Middle Pleistocene Africa contained multiple contemporaneous hominin lineages (that is, Homo sapiens^8,9, H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and Homo naledi^10,11), similar to Eurasia, where Homo neanderthalensis, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and perhaps also Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus¹² were found contemporaneously. The age estimate also raises further questions about the mode of evolution of H. sapiens in Africa and whether H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis was a direct ancestor of our species^13,14.

Broken Hill (Kabwe) 的颅骨是 1921 年在现在赞比亚¹的金属矿石开采过程中从洞穴矿床中发现的。它是人类化石中保存最完好的头骨之一，最初被指定为罗得西亚人的模式标本，但最近它经常被列入海德堡人分类群^2,3,4。然而，原来的地点已经完全被挖走了，而且——尽管颅骨通常估计大约有 50 万年的历史^5,6,7——但它不系统的恢复阻碍了它在人类进化中的准确定年和定位。在这里，我们直接对头骨进行分析，发现最佳年龄估计为 299 ± 2.5 万年（平均值 ± 2 σ）。结果表明，晚期中更新世非洲包含多个同时代的古人类谱系（即智人^8,9、H. heidelbergensis / H. rhodesiensis和Homo naledi ^10,11），类似于欧亚大陆，尼安德特人、丹尼索瓦人、智人弗洛雷斯人、 吕宋人 ，也许还有海德堡人和直立人¹²同时被发现。年龄估计也引发了关于非洲智人进化模式以及海德堡人是否/H. rhodesiensis是我们物种^13,14的直系祖先。