1.4-Million-Year-Old Skull Fragments Linked to Mystery Human Ancestor

Most of a human face found in northern Spain belongs to a primitive archaic human, marking the oldest known evidence of hominins in western Europe, anthropologists announced Wednesday. The facial remains are not those of Homo antecessor, an archaic human species whose roughly 900,000-year-old remains were previously found at the same site, according to the research. Rather, the facial fragments belong to Homo affinis erectus—and the finding, reported today in Nature, indicates that the human population in Europe turned over at the end of the Early Pleistocene. “This paper introduces a new actor in the story of human evolution in Europe, Homo affinis erectus,” said study co-author Rosa Huguet, a paleoanthropologist at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social, in a Nature press briefing. “This finding allows us to accept that during the early Pleistocene, more than one early human species lived in Europe, and that the first hominid to inhabit western Europe was not ... Read full article.