Here we carried out analyses directly on the skull and found a best age estimate of 299±25thousand years (mean±2σ). The result suggests that later Middle Pleistocene Africa contained multiple contemporaneous hominin lineages (that is, Homo sapiens8,9, H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and Homo naledi10,11), similar to Eurasia, where Homo neanderthalensis, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis,Homo luzonensisand perhaps also Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus12 were found contemporaneously.
Dating the skull from Broken Hill, Zambia, and its position in human evolution
A mysterious but well-preserved hominid skull found nearly a century ago comes from a population that lived in Africa around 300,000 years ago, as the earliest Homo sapiens were evolving, a new study finds.
African H. heidelbergensis could have been a recently reported “ghost population” (SN: 3/14/20) that interbred with ancient H. sapiens and passed a small amount of DNA to present-day West Africans, the researchers suggest April 1 in Nature.
Including the "extra tall" gene - as I previously documented.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/broken-hill-skull-fossil-may-be-from-african-ghost-population
In that scenario, mating occurred among dispersed human populations with various skeletal traits, as did occasional interbreeding with other Homo species. “It wouldn’t be surprising if there was some gene flow between the lineage leading to us and H. heidelbergensis,” she says.
If we can interbreed - then it's more like a "subspecies" - but maybe they don't like the connotation of "sub" having a negative denotation.
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