In 1921, a Swiss miner named Tom Zwiglaar made an extraordinary find. While working in a lead and zinc mine in what is now Zambia, he stumbled across a remarkably preserved skull. The specimen, now known as Kabwe 1 or the Broken Hill Skull, was sent to paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward at London’s Natural History Museum. He determined the skull belonged to an extinct hominin species he dubbed Homo rhodesiensis. Contemporary scientists generally consider the skull, still kept at the Natural History Museum, to be from H. heidelbergensis and have dated it to between 300,000 and 125,000 years old.
For Ricardo Godinho, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Algarve in Portugal, Kabwe 1 holds particular appeal. “Not only is it one of the best-preserved hominin crania, it also has one of the largest brow ridges in the fossil record,” he says. “One of the things that is remarkably different ...
