A team of scientists has made a groundbreaking discovery in northern Spain, uncovering fossilized bone fragments that reveal a previously unknown human population living over 1.1 million years ago. The finds, discovered at the Sima del Elefante site in the Atapuerca Mountains, include a partial skull with the left side of an adult hominin’s face.
The fossils are significant not only because they represent one of the earliest known human fossil remains in Western Europe but also because they don’t match up with any previously identified human species. The team suspects that the specimens belong to Homo erectus, a species well-known from African and Asian fossils, but whose remains have never been found in Europe.
The discovery was made possible by advanced imaging and 3D analysis techniques, which allowed researchers to reconstruct the fragmented face fossil. While the findings are intriguing, they are also cautious, as the team acknowledges that more research is needed to confirm the identity of the human species.
“We’re documenting for the first time a hominin population we didn’t know we had in Europe,” said María Martinón-Torres, director of CENIEH, Spain’s National Human Evolution Research Centre. The findings are a significant contribution to our understanding of human evolution and the history of life on Earth.
The Sima del Elefante site has been an important location for paleoanthropology, with previous discoveries including the identification of Homo antecessor from around 850,000-year-old fossils. However, this new discovery sheds new light on the history of human migration and settlement in Europe, and it is expected to generate further research and debate in the scientific community.
The team also recovered animal bones with cut marks and stone tools used for butchering carcasses from the site, indicating a woodland environment rich in prey. The population that inhabited this region would have lived in a time before the emergence of Neanderthals, who appeared on the continent around 400,000 years ago.
Further research is needed to fully understand the significance of this discovery, but it is clear that it represents a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution and the history of life on Earth.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/12/science/earliest-human-fossils-western-europe/index.html