The First Europeans - 1 Million Years
Our knowledge of human evolution has always been limited by the meagre quantities of hominid fossils that have been discovered. But a system of limestone caves at Atapuerca in northern Spain has yielded an embarrassment of riches by comparison with an otherwise patchy hominid record.
The pit of bones
Since the 1980s, archaeologists have recovered the remains of 32 individuals from a chamber at the bottom of a 14m (45ft) shaft known as La Sima de los Huesos ('The Pit of Bones'). The bones, which date to around 300,000 years ago, comprise 75% of hominid fossils known between 100,000 and 1.5 million years ago.
"Atapuerca was a good place to live. There was a river nearby and it was high up, so it was a good vantage point for hunters. The cave shelters there provided them with refuge," says Professor José Bermúdez de Castro of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid and co-director of the Atapuerca research team.
Oldest European
The remains at La Sima belong to a species of hominid called Homo heidelbergensis. But another site at Atapuerca has produced the remains of the oldest human ever found in Europe; a partial skull belonging to a young male who lived 780,000 years ago. This skull was discovered in 1994, when the Atapuerca team were excavating the site of an old railway cutting at the Atapuercan locality of Trinchera Dolina.
The specimen shares many similarities with Homo ergaster. But Professor Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid and co-director of the Atapuerca research considers it different enough to give it a new species name: Homo antecessor. Not all palaeoanthropologists accept this classification because it is based on a juvenile specimen and key characteristics of a species often develop only in adulthood. Professor Eudald Carbonell of the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain says recent examination of the Trinchera Dolina remains suggests Homo antecessor could not have been ancestral to heidelbergensis. Instead, says Carbonell, antecessor was probably extinct by around 600,000 years ago.
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