Western Europe’s oldest face adds new wrinkles to human evolution

A Spanish cave has divulged the oldest identified fossil remains of human ancestors in Western Europe.

Excavations at a inform identified as Sima del Elefante produced a lot of fossil fragments that, when pieced collectively, originate a partial left upper jaw and cheek bone dated to between 1.4 million and 1.1 million years old, convey zooarchaeologist Rosa Huguet of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, and colleagues.

That old midface comes from a previously unknown European Homo population, the researchers fable March 12 in Nature.

“This discovery introduces a new actor within the story of human evolution in Europe,” Huguet acknowledged at a March 11 press briefing.

Some aspects of the jaw and cheek resemble those of Homo erectus individuals who reached a inform called Dmanisi, in what’s now the Southwest Asian nation of Georgia, around 1.8 million years ago. Nonetheless no longer ample evidence exists to resolve whether the brand new find qualifies as H. erectus or as a separate species, the investigators convey.

Huguet’s crew digitally scanned every fossil fragment to invent a digital, three-D version of the total old midface. A replicate image of the reassembled left-facet fossils used to be aged to portray the honest facet of the digital midface.

A lower jaw fossil previously unearthed at Sima del Elefante dates to between roughly 1.2 million to 1.1 million years ago and can should bear belonged to the identical unnamed Homo species because the facial fossil, they imply.

Hominid fossils excavated over the past 30 years at Gran Dolina, a cave located shut to Sima del Elefante, attain from a species Huguet’s team calls Homo antecessor, which lived between roughly 900,000 and 800,000 years ago. Vertically oriented, flat cheek bones of H. antecessor resemble those of americans currently, now not just like the older Sima del Elefante face fossils.

Evolutionary ties between those two old European Homo species stay unclear. Individuals of the Sima del Elefante species — who additionally left within the support of a small sequence of easy stone cutting or reducing tools — may possibly need survived till presently after the arrival of H. antecessor, the researchers convey. In reinforce of that effort, animal bones and plant remains excavated within the identical sediment because the old midface fossils replicate composed temperatures and a environment dotted with meadows, woods, shrubs and streams.

If newest evidence holds up of obscene cool temporarily driving hominid populations out of Europe presently sooner than 1.1 million years ago, then the Sima del Elefante Homo species can bear died out sooner than H. antecessor arrived, the scientists convey.

Huguet’s team affords a carefully reconstructed midface for one in every of the oldest identified European hominids, says Harvard University organic anthropologist G. Philip Rightmire, who didn't participate within the brand new scrutinize. He suspects, though, that the old Sima del Elefante crowd belonged to H. erectus.

Fossil remains of four H. erectus faces at Dmanisi interpret substantial variation in nasal constructing and other midface traits, Rightmire says. One among those faces aligns closely with the Spanish midface discovery, he contends. After H. erectus left Africa, “I'd put my money on a prolonged lasting regional[[H. erectus]population occupying Dmanisi around 1.8 million years ago, with later populations coming into into Europe,” Rightmire says.