The remains comprise a complete fossilized skull, which was discovered by Liu Shuntang in 1978 in Dali County, Shaanxi Province, China.

Unlike the distinct tubular form seen in H. erectus, the tympanic plate is thin and foreshortened, a condition similar to that of modern humans.

In 1981, Wu Xinzhi produced a much more substantial description of the specimen, and instead concluded it is a transitional morph between H. erectus and modern humans, coining the name "Homo sapiens daliensis".

[13] At around this time, the nomen Homo heidelbergensis was regaining popularity, being largely assigned to various Middle Pleistocene African and European specimens.

[13] Some authors additionally lumped contemporary East Asian remains into it, including Dali, first suggested by anthropologists Aurélien Mounier, Silvana Condemi, and Giorgio Manzi in 2011.

[14] In 2016, Manzi recommended resurrecting Wu's nomen as "H. heidelbergensis daliensis" for Middle Pleistocene East Asian specimens.

In 2021, Chinese paleoanthropologist Qiang Ji and colleagues described a new species, Homo longi, based on a late Middle Pleistocene skull from Harbin in northeastern China.

[16] In a study published the same day, Israeli anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz and colleagues suggested the apparent diversity of supposedly unique forms during the Middle Pleistocene is the result of a complex network of cross-continental interbreeding, based on the 140 to 120 thousand years old Israeli Nesher Ramla remains which feature a mix of Neanderthal and H. erectus traits.

[19][20][21] A possibly fourth member could be the Narmada skull from the Madhya Pradesh in India, consisting of a single robust cranial vault.

[22] The Denisova hominin, represented originally by a very robust finger bone found in the Altai mountains in Russia, and to which especially the find of a partial mandible in the Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau in China was later added, are still in discussion if they might be linked to the Dali people (see Denisovan §Specimens).