Spain settled far earlier than previously believed

[Kara Sundstrom]

Spain dig yields ancient European 
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News 


 
The lower jaw could be from a female


The discovery 
Scientists have discovered the oldest human remains in western Europe.
A jawbone and teeth discovered at the famous Atapuerca site in northern Spain have been dated between 1.1 and 1.2 million years old.

The finds provide further evidence for the great antiquity of human occupation

on the continent, the researchers write in the journal Nature.

Scientists also found stone tools and animal bones with tell-tale cut marks from butchering by humans.

  It gives us confidence that Europe was not left out of the picture of the spread of early humans

Prof Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum
The discovery comprises part of a human's lower jawbone. The remains of seven teeth were found still in place; an isolated tooth, belonging to the same individual, was also unearthed.


Its small size suggests it could have belonged to a female.

The find was made in the Sierra de Atapuerca, a region of gently rolling hills near the Spanish city of Burgos which contains a complex of ancient limestone caves.


See one view of human evolution
These caves have yielded abundant, well-preserved evidence of ancient occupation by humans and have been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site.

The new remains were unearthed at the archaeological site of Sima del Elefante, which lies just a few hundred metres from two other locations which have yielded remains of early Europeans.

"It is the oldest human fossil yet found in Western Europe," said co-author Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, director of Spain's National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos.

 

[Kara Sundstrom]

Ancient migration

Dr Bermudez de Castro told BBC News that the latest find had anatomical features linking it to earlier hominins (modern humans, their ancestors and relatives since divergence from apes) discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia - at the gates of Europe.

 


Several teeth were preserved with the jaw
The Georgian hominins lived some 1.7 million years ago and represent an early expansion of humans outside Africa.

The researchers therefore suggest that Western Europe was settled by a population of hominins coming from the east.

Once these early people had "won the West" they evolved into a distinct species - Homo antecessor, or "Pioneer Man", say the scientists.

The scientists now plan to investigate whether Pioneer Man might have been ancestral to Neanderthals and to even our own species Homo sapiens.

"In terms of European prehistory, this [find] is very significant," said Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London's Natural History Museum.

The timing of the earliest human habitation in Europe has been controversial.

"The earliest hominins outside Africa are those from Dmanisi in Georgia. After that, we have occupations in Europe, but the ages are not very precise. They are also without hominin [remains]," said Dr Marina Mosquera, a co-author from the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain.

[Kara Sundstrom]

Reliable date

The Spanish researchers used three different techniques to date the new fossils: palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclide dating and biostratigraphy.

The researchers said the new find represented the earliest reliably dated evidence of human occupation in Europe.

"What we have are the European descendents of the first migration out of Africa," said Dr Mosquera.

Professor Stringer said that until more material was discovered from Atapuerca, he was cautious about assigning the new specimen to the species Homo antecessor.

But he added: "However the specimen is classified, when combined with the emerging archaeological evidence, it suggests that southern Europe began to be colonised from western Asia not long after humans had emerged from Africa - something which many of us would have doubted even five years ago."

"It gives us confidence that Europe was not left out of the picture of the spread of early humans. Early humans got to Java and China by 1.5 million years ago and certainly some of the animal remains found at those Asian sites are found in Western Europe too."

He explained that the people at Sima del Elefante had made primitive stone tools and would have had relatively small brains. The outside of the jawbone had some primitive anatomical features, but the inside displayed some more advanced characteristics, he added.

This suggested they may have been evolving towards humans which are known from much later in time, such as Homo heidelbergensis.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7313005.stm

[Kara Sundstrom]

Human Ancestor Fossil Found
Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008 By AP/DANIEL WOOLLS

(MADRID, Spain) — A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.

The new find appears to be from the same species, researchers said.

A team co-led by Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution, reported their find in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The timing of the earliest occupation of Europe by humans that emerged from Africa has been controversial for many years.

Some archeologists believe the process was a stop-and-go one in which species of hominins — a group that includes the extinct relatives of modern humans — emerged and died out quickly only to be replaced by others, making for a very slow spread across the continent, Carbonell said in an interview.

Until now the oldest hominin fossils found in Europe were the Homo antecessor ones, also found at Atapuerca, but at a separate digging site, and a skull from Ceprano in Italy.

Carbonell's team has tentatively classified the new fossil as representing an earlier example of Homo antecessor. And, critically, the team says the new one also bears similarities to much-older fossils dug up since 1983 in the Caucasus at a place called Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. These were dated as being up to 1.8 million years old.

"This leads us to a very important, very interesting conclusion," Carbonell said. It is this: that hominins which emerged from Africa and settled in the Caucasus eventually evolved into Homo antecessor, and that the latter populated Europe not 800,000 years ago, but at least 1.3 million years ago.

"This discovery of a 1.3 million-year-old fossil shows the process was accelerated and continuous; that the occupation of Europe happened very early and much faster than we had thought," Carbonell said.

Chris Stringer, a leading researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and not involved in the project, said Carbonell's team had done solid dating work to estimate the antiquity of the new Atapuerca fossil by employing three separate techniques — some researchers only use one or two — including a relatively new one that measures radioactive decay of sediments.

"This is a well-dated site, as much as any site that age can be," Stringer said.

But he also expressed some caution about Carbonell's conclusions.

First of all, the newly found jawbone fragment, which measures about two inches long and has teeth attached to it, preserves a section not seen in the equivalent pieces found at Atapuerca in 1997. So assigning both to the same species must be provisional, Stringer said.

And on the broader issue of tracing the new fossil back to the species unearthed at Dmanisi — Carbonell's big leap arguing continuity — Stringer said this too must be tentative because it is based on just a piece of a front of a jawbone and the time lapse is half a million years.

"That is a long period of time to talk about continuity," Stringer said.

Still, there are similarities between the two and this along with other archaeological evidence, suggests southern Europe did in fact begin to be colonized from western Asia not long after humans emerged from Africa — "something which many of us would have doubted even five years ago," Stringer said.

Carbonell says that with the finding of human fossils 1.3 million years old in Europe, researchers can now expect to find older ones, even up to 1.8 million years old, in other parts of the continent.

"This has to be the next discovery," he said. "This is the scientific hypothesis."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1725729,00.html