ARCHAEOLOGISTS have found the oldest human remains yet discovered in Europe,
a primitive primate that might be a species in its own right.
The teeth and jaw fragments from four people - two adults, one individual about 15 years old and one about three or four - have been dated to older than 780,000 years, more than a quarter of a million years older than previous dates suggested for when humans migrated into western Europe.
The remains are also much older than Boxgrove Man, whose shin bone was found in a
gravel quarry in Sussex in 1993, and is estimated to have lived between 535,000 and
485,000 years ago.
The new fossils were found in a site called Atapuerca in northern Spain, in Gran Dolina
cave, by a Spanish team that describes the find today in the journal Science. The date was determined from adjacent rock strata.
The fossils could be considered a primitive hominid that lies some way between the
ancestor of the Neanderthals, Homo Heidelbergensis, and the African Homo Erectus,
called Homo Ergaster.
If more individuals are found, they may have to name a new species. However, the
scientists lack enough remains to know what these individuals looked like.
"We have found little fragments of a skull, mandible, teeth and some other bones," said
Dr Antonio Rosas, one of the Spanish researchers working at the Natural History Museum in London.
The site also contains clues to the environment: when the individuals were alive, the weather and flora was similar to that today, though the animal community contained elephants, horses and hyenas.
Atapuerca's complex of limestone caves has produced many fossils, providing scientists with the first clear picture of the evolution of humans in prehistoric Europe. Another cave, known as 'the Pit of Bones', has been excavated since 1976 and has yielded more than 700 human fossils, belonging to at least 24 individuals, indisputably related to Neanderthals.
This is easy to tell because the faces are intact - Neanderthals have a distinctive protruding face in comparison with modern or other archaic humans.
These results clarify Europe's early history. The traditional sub-divisions of humankind
for the last million years begin with Homo Erectus, popularly known as Peking and Java Man.
All agree that this group evolved in Africa and spread into Asia, where the first specimens were found. The trouble starts with Erectus's descendants - how the Neanderthals and "archaic" humans fit together.
The latest finds reveal details of a different evolutionary line from our own, one that died out with the Neanderthals some 40,000 years ago. "We are dealing here with the very very early forerunners of the Neanderthals," said Dr Rosas. "We are, in effect, cousins of the Neanderthals."
