Homo helmei

Homo helmei is a proposed species name linked to the Florisbad Skull, an important human fossil of the early Middle Stone Age that was discovered in 1932 by T. F. Dreyer at the Florisbad site in the Free State Province of South Africa. Dreyer named it in 1935 as Homo (Africanthropus) helmei, after Captain Helme, and it was the first human fossil found in Africa directly associated with either stone tools or extinct animals. Because the skull is hard to place in either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo sapiens, McBrearty and Brooks revived the designation Homo helmei in 2000. Later researchers, including Chris Stringer in 2016 and Hublin and colleagues in 2017, classified the skull as an early or archaic form of Homo sapiens, so the name is generally treated as a probable early form of our own species.