Scientists left shocked by skull found in cave wall that analysis shows isn’t human

Researchers have discovered a strange-looking skull that does not appear to be human in nature.

It’s not every day you get to find a new species, and with this discovery come many questions about our ancestry and history.

The strange skull was found by scientists in the Petralona Cave in Greece and is thought to be less than 300,000 years old.

Known as the Petralona skull (creative), it didn’t take long for researchers to deduce that it’s not derived from Homo sapiens (us) or the Neanderthal.

The Petralona skull was found with a stalagmite mineral formation on its forehead, giving it the appearance of a unicorn’s horn.

They occur when water drips from the cave ceiling, creating little structures throughout the years.

The skull, which was found by local villager Christos Sariannidis in 1960, was seen to be stuck to the cave wall.

The Petralona skull was found in 1960 in a Greek cave (Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists found that it was stuck there due to calcite, a mineral that is typically found in caves, and removed it from the skull.

Once it was transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, it was put on display for all to see.

The skull underwent extensive testing to find out how old it was and where exactly it came from.

Scientists managed to date the calcite on the 'nearly complete cranium' to be at least 277,000 years old.

However, it could be 295,000 years old, which would mean that the calcite began to form around the late part of the Middle Pleistocene era of Europe.

“Assigning an age to the nearly complete cranium found in the Petralona Cave in Greece is of outstanding importance,” the team said. “This fossil has a key position in European human evolution.”

The dating suggests that the specimen is likely a member of a primitive, extinct hominid that coexisted with Homo neanderthalensis.

"From a morphological point of view," wrote a team led by geochronologist Christophe Falguères of the Institute Of Human Paleontology in France. "The Petralona hominin forms part of a distinct and more primitive group than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and the new age estimate provides further support for the coexistence of this population alongside the evolving Neanderthal lineage in the later Middle Pleistocene of Europe."

The Petralona skull seems to belong to a Homo heidelbergensis person, a species that has had its timeline in our history debated.

It has been dated to around 300,00 years ago (Wikimedia Commons)

This is because the skull shows similarities to a skull found in a cave in Kabwe, Zambia.

The Kabwe skull is around 300,000 years old and has been classed as belonging to the Homo heidelbergensis.

"Our results from dating the matrix attached to the Petralona cranium suggest that like the Kabwe cranium, the Petralona cranium may date to about 300,000 years ago, consistent with their persistence into the later Middle Pleistocene," the researchers said in the study.

This means it could have lived in Europe alongside Neanderthals, the extinct group that are our only ancient human relatives.

However, other experts think they date back to before Neanderthals and were a more primitive group of people.

Homo heidelbergensis lived between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago in Africa, with some of its population migrating to Europe.

The skull's teeth reveal that it likely belonged to a young man, as its teeth were lightly worn, as per study author Professor Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, as he spoke to Live Science.

However, getting the exact species and timeline right is difficult, as the ‘topic has been debated since its discovery more than 60 years ago, highlighting the difficulties in applying physical dating methods to prehistoric samples,' admitted the team.