So said the excavation team led by Li Zhanyang, working the site of Xuchang, in Henan province, China, just last month. And then they did:
The pieces of the human skull showed up just when archaeologists were going home for the Spring Festival.
"It was freezing cold and digging was difficult. We planned to leave the next day when one of us saw something like part of a human skull," said Li.
"It was 9 am, and only an hour earlier we joked and said: 'Let's get a skull today'.
"And there it was."
There's no publication on the cranium, this is just a press announcement of their discovery. Most of the articles are running with this picture, courtesy of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage:
It will be nice to see it put together. This is a tremendously important time period, during which there are only a handful of human fossils from East Asia.
This detail made it into a number of stories:
The fossil consisted of 16 pieces of the skull with protruding eyebrows and a small forehead. More astonishing than the completeness of the skull is that it still has a fossilized membrane on the inner side, so scientists can track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors, Li said.
The pieces were fossilized because they were buried 5 m near the mouth of a spring, whose water had a high content of calcium.
I suppose that must mean one (or more) of the arachnoid membranes had calcified on the inside table of the cranial bone, but we'll have to wait and see.
