So far it is unclear when the European continent was populated by early people and which. Now a 1.1 to 1.4 million year old fossil find from a cave in northern Spain provides new information. The fossil bones comprise parts of the facial skull of an early man, including fragments of the upper jaw and one of the two joch arches. The find thus represents the oldest preserved facial skull of an early man in Europe, as the research team reports. The anatomy of this fossil also differs significantly from that of Homo Antecessor and other European early people known to date. This suggests that Europe was populated by at least two, perhaps more different early people.
Before the Neanderthals spread in Europe, there was early people on our continent. These archaic human forms probably developed from Homo erectus, the first early person who left Africa and populated Eurasia. But when these successors of Homo erectus reached Europe and how they developed there is so far unclear. Because so far there are only a few fossils and these usually consist only of a few fragmented bones. Fossil finds from Georgian Dmanissi show that the first representative of the genus Homo had reached the Caucasus 1.8 million years ago. The next clearly dated relics come from France and Spain and are around 1.2 million years old. The oldest, securely dated European stone tools, date from around 1.4 million years ago and were found in Ukraine. But what kind of these early people belonged and how they were related is so far unknown – also because often decisive anatomical features are not preserved.
Bone pieces of an early man face
However, there is now a new fossil find that throws more light on the early residents of Europe. It comes from the Sima del elefante cave in the northern Spanish municipality of Atafuerca, where there are several important fossil foundations. In 1990, 860,000 -year -old fossil remains of Homo Antecessor were discovered in the nearby Gran Dolina cave, which already had more modern features than Homo erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis. He is considered a possible forerunner of the Neanderthals. In 2008, archaeologists then discovered an early human lower jaw at the height of Sima del Elefante, which was dated to an age of 1.1 to 1.2 million years. However, it was not possible to determine whether this ATE9-1 baptized fossil also comes from a Homo Antecessor. A team led by Rosa Huguet from the Catalan Institute for Paleoecology and Human Evolution (Iphes-Cerca) in Tarragona has therefore carried out further excavations in Sima del Elefante. In 2022, the archaeologists encountered some stone treasures, numerous animal bones and some fossil bone fragments of a hominine in a somewhat lower layer of found.
According to the first dates, the ATE7-1 baptized finds are 1.1 to 1.4 million years old. They are probably a bit older than the lower jaw discovered in 2008 and significantly older than the 860,000 years of the remains of the Homo Antecessor from Gran Dolino, as the team reports. The bones comprise fragments of the upper jaw and the left yoke bone of an adult early man. “This fossil represents the oldest human face that has so far been found in Western Europe,” write Huguet and her colleagues. But what early man does these facial bones come from? To find out that, the researchers analyzed each bone fragment, scanned it and used 3D models to virtually put them together. Now these analyzes have been completed. They show that the facial bones of ATE7-1 do not come from Homo Antecessor, but have to belong to an archaic early man species “Homo Antecessor shares with Homo sapiens a more modern appearance of the face and a pronounced nose structure,” explains co-author María Martinón-Torres from the National Research Center in Burgos. The Fossil ATE7-1, which is also baptized “Pink”, are missing most of these more modern features.
Having your own early?
“We can therefore say relatively safely that this copy belonged to another species than the Homo Antecessor from Gran Dolina,” the researchers state. The new finds also differed from the early people fossils from the Georgian Dmanissi. As the team stated, the facial bones of ATE7-1 in its flat and underdeveloped nose structure are more like the homo erectus. However, there are also differences here: ATE7-1 already has “modern” corner pits in the upper jaw and its face is narrower than that of the most known homo-erectus copies. According to Huguet and her colleagues, the facial fossil from the Sima-Del-elepante cave could therefore be a previously unknown early person species. “The evidence is not yet sufficient for a final classification, which is why Homo Affini’s erectus has been assigned. This name characterizes the similarities of Pink with Homo erectus, but leaves the possibility that it could belong to a different kind, ”explains Martinón-Torres.
In any case, however, the new find indicates that there must have been at least two different types of early people in Western Europe in this period 1.4 million to 860,000 years ago: Homo Affinis erectus and later the Homo Antecessor. The landscape around the ATAPUERCA caves offered these early representatives of human genus particularly favorable conditions, such as animal bones and fossil residues: “The data indicate that there was an open, moist forest landscape in the vicinity of the cave with trees, bushes and watercourses,” report Huguet and their colleagues. However, there are also indications that the climatic conditions deteriorated around 1.1 million years ago, as a study showed in 2023. This could possibly explain why no intermediate forms of Homo Affini’s erectus and Homo Antecessor in ATAPUERCA were found: The cold period may have driven the early people from this area and Homo Antecessor back to northern Spain. “This site is therefore crucial for the understanding of our origins and the new fossil discovery confirms the role of ATAPUERCA as a crucial place for researching human evolution,” says Huguet’s colleague Marina Mosquera from Iphes-Cerca.
Source: Rosa Huguet (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana I Evolució Social (Iphes-Cerca), Tarragona) et al., Nature, DOI: 10.1038/S41586-025-08681-0