A NEW member of the human family has been uncovered in Spain by scientists who believe he is the oldest known European.
Our million-year-old ancestor dined on human flesh and has surprised scientists because he had a face that looks remarkably modern.
The team that made the find has named this, the first new member of the human family to be found in over a decade, Homo antecessor, from the Latin word meaning explorer, or one who goes first.
A warren of caves in the red limestone Atapuerca hills of northern Spain yielded specimens of the new species of hominid - two infants, two adolescents and two young adults - that lived 800,000 years ago. They may be the last common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct cousins, the Neanderthals.
If the discovery of H antecessor becomes widely accepted, it will bump H erectus and H heidelbergensis off the main line of human descent, making them sidelimbs on an increasingly bushy family tree that reflects an increasingly diverse record of hominid fossils.
More than 780,000 years ago, an 11-year-old boy died at the site and today only part of his face remains. But that part is stunning, because it "is exactly like ours", said Dr Antonio Rossas of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.
The face had familiar modern features, such as sunken cheekbones with a horizontal ridge where the upper teeth attach, and a projecting nose and mid-face.
Another member of the team, Dr Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, said that the modern-looking mid-face, which is less protuberant than older hominids, is more commonly seen in fossils that are much younger. Until today, hominids with a modern face were thought to have evolved about 200,000 years ago.
But the new fossils also had primitive features, such as a prominent brow ridge. The resulting mosaic of modern and primitive features did not fit any known species, suggesting that these individuals gave rise to both modern humans and Neanderthals, the heavy-set species that lived in Ice Age Europe until about 28,000 years ago.
Because both modern humans and Neanderthals evolved from H antecessor, the find suggests that our more recent ancestors retained this face and that Neanderthals developed a more "advanced" facial appearance, said Dr Bermudez de Castro.
"Our face, which appeared about one million years ago, is primitive in relation to that of the Neanderthals."
One additional, bizarre find was that the bones were covered with cut marks, indicating that their bodies were stripped of flesh and processed like those of animals killed for meat.
Two members of the team are studying the evidence of cannibalism. So far it seems that the individual was not the victim of a ritual but had been eaten after dying of another cause.
The authors suggest in the journal Science that H antecessor originated in Africa up to 1.2 million years ago, where it spawned H sapiens long before that species' migration to Europe.
They speculate that members of H antecessor began to spread out about one million years ago and headed to Europe, leaving the fossils found at Atapuerca.
Some members of the species evolved into H heidelbergensis. These humans headed farther north into Europe, where they in turn led to Neanderthals - but not to modern humans.
Meanwhile, the southern members of H antecessor, probably still in Africa, gave rise to modern humans by way of another, as yet unidentified transitional species, said Dr Bermudez de Castro.
