A pre-human fossil skull that could yield important new information about the evolution of man has turned up in a New York shop.

The skull was obtained by the Columbus Avenue shop Maxilla and Mandible Ltd in March from a mysterious man who claimed to represent the estate of a collector. The shop's owner Henry Galiano realised it could be ancient and valuable and called in experts from the nearby American Museum of Natural History.

The grey-coloured skull, a nearly complete cranium but missing an upper and lower jaw, is probably that of a male Homo erectus in his 20s who walked the earth between 1.7 million and 300,000 years ago, scientistshave concluded. The fossil is believed to have come originally from Indonesia.

"It's a very interesting specimen because it's not like any other Homo erectus we know from Indonesia or anywhere else," said Dr Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York who led the investigation.

Although the skull's brain size appears to be within range for Homo erectus - about half the size of a modern human's brain - its forehead is high like a Homo sapien and not sloping like an earlier hominids. The inside surface of the skull also shows the brain had some similar features to that of Homo sapiens suggesting a potential for speech.

"Of course, it's only one individual, but it could represent a distinctive population. We just don't know," Delson told the New York Times.

The skull, which could have fetched as much as $500,000 on the open market, has been returned to Indonesia.

"The proper thing is to give it a home so people can study it," said Galiano, whose shop window display boasts bleached bones, mounted insects and animal sculptures, among other natural-history curiosities.

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