Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin in China, is an early Late Pleistocene paleoanthropological site famous for its archaic hominin fossils.

Twenty hominid fossils were discovered at Xujiayao, consisting of 12 parietal bones, 1 temporal bone, 2 occipital bones, 1 mandibular bone fragment, 1 juvenile maxilla, and 3 isolated teeth.

The fossils remains at Xujiayao are difficult to classify and are of an uncertain taxonomic lineage, possibly representing a distinct hominin lineage.

The Xujiayao fossils are characterized by a mix of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens features. The skulls also have a thick cranial vault, at the upper range of Homo erectus pekinensis. The maxilla exhibits features more typical of modern Homo sapiens.

Dental analysis shows that the Xujiayao hominin appears to retain many archaic features found in hominin fossils, such as Homo pekinensis, from the Early and Middle Pleistocene in East Asia, share more similarities with these earlier East Asian hominins, and share some similarities with Neanderthals. While fossil sample Xujiayao 15 had mostly non-Neanderthal features appearance-wise, a CT scan revealed that the inner ear, surprisingly, was arranged in a way that was typical of Neanderthal inner ears.

One of the fossil samples, Xujiayao 11, had an enlarged parietal foramen (a hole in the skull), an extremely rare abnormality that is found in less than 1 out of 25,000 cases in modern humans. Xujiayao 11 is the oldest hominin fossil to exhibit this abnormality.

In terms of brain capacity, "Researchers reconstructed a complete skull of Xujiayao Man for the first time and estimated that the cranial capacity of the ancient relative of modern humans reached 1,700 cubic centimeters" and "The average brain capacity of modern humans is about 1,400 cc and the normal range is from 1,100 cc to 1,700 cc ".