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when school started on september 1, 2024, first-year junior high school students in many areas received their history textbooks and found that a new term "yunxian people" had been added to the first lesson.

the reporter learned from the people's education press that in the first volume of the compulsory education textbook "chinese history" for seventh graders, "yunxian people" were written into the first unit and the first lesson together with the world-famous "yuanmou people", "lantian people", "peking man" and "shandingdong man".

on may 18, 2022, the skull fossil no. 3 of the "yunxian man" was discovered at the xuetangliangzi site in yunyang district, shiyan, hubei. in the past 40 years, the skull fossils no. 1 and no. 2 of the "yunxian man" had also been unearthed here. the discovery of three skull fossils shocked the world.

after more than two years of research and demonstration, "yunxian man" was written into the new edition of history textbooks, becoming a "new partner" in the sequence of ancient humans in my country, which shows its important academic and historical status.

professor gao xing, a researcher at the institute of vertebrate paleontology and paleoanthropology, chinese academy of sciences, believes that this is undoubtedly a human fossil. judging from the stratigraphic position and cementation of the third human skull fossil, the age is basically consistent with the second and first "yunxian man" skull fossils excavated at the liangzixuetang site, which is approximately between 80 and 1 million years old.

professor gao xing shared the excavation story of "yunxian man" no. 3 in cctv's "first lesson of the school year" in 2023.

the excavation of three skull fossils of "yunxian people" fills the gap in the evolutionary history of east asian homo erectus. this provides an important basis for verifying the million-year history of human evolution in china and telling the story of the evolution and development of the ancestors of the eastern human hometown.

at the end of 2022, staff extracted "yunxian man" no. 3 from the archaeological cabin (data photo).

computer reconstruction of the skulls of yunxian people no. 1, 2, and 3

whether you are a middle school student, a young child, or an "overage" adult, let us remember this new knowledge point about chinese history - the million-year-old "yunxian people".

producer | geng zhimin

producer | zhang pengjun, peng yiran

director | li shang

videographer | wang feng and sun yuchao

editing | peng shuai, tao chenwei

visual | gao lingxiao

editor | liu xinyan

coordination | yang bo jin yi jie liu xiao yu jian

acknowledgements | hubei provincial institute of cultural relics and archaeology, publicity department of shiyan municipal committee of the communist party of china

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