Unknown early man Europe's oldest facial fossil discovered
Sensational discovery in a cave in northern Spain: Fossil fragments of a face could belong to a previously unknown early human species.
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- A team of researchers in Spain has discovered fossil facial bones that are around 1.1 million to 1.4 million years old.
- The fragments of jaw, cheeks and nose are thus from the oldest preserved facial skull of an unknown early human in Europe.
- Europe was probably inhabited by at least two, perhaps even more, species of humans at that time.
This discovery may provide new insights into the first inhabitants of Europe: Fossilized facial bones dating back approximately 1.1 to 1.4 million years have been discovered in a cave in northern Spain. The fragments of jaw, cheeks and nose are thus from the oldest preserved facial skull of an unknown early human in Europe. As a research team writes in the scientific journal "Nature", the find proves that Europe was populated by at least two, perhaps even more, human species at that time.
"This fossil represents the oldest human face yet found in Western Europe," write Rosa Huguet and her colleagues from the Catalan Institute of Paleoecology and Human Evolution. The anatomical analyses reveal that the facial bones known as ATE7-1 probably come from an unknown early human species. They differ from Homo antecessor, a species that lived in Western Europe about 850,000 years ago and had a slender midface structure similar to modern humans.
Because of the similarities to Homo erectus, the paleanthropologists have provisionally named their find "Homo affinis erectus". For the researchers, the find clearly means that there were at least two different early human species in Western Europe between 1.4 million and 860,000 years ago - Homo affinis erectus and later Homo antecessor.
