Media release

From: Springer Nature

Archaeology: Earliest-known partial human face from Western Europe

The discovery of the oldest known facial bones from a hominin from western Europe, approximately 1.4–1.1 million years old, is reported in Nature.

It is suggested that Eurasia was first settled by hominins at least 1.8 million years ago. Evidence of early hominin settlement in Western Europe has been limited to extremely fragmented fossil samples from the Iberian Peninsula, providing few clues about the appearance and taxonomy of these hominins. Fossils from a Spanish site, dated from approximately 850,000 years ago, were determined to be from Homo antecessor, a species of early people with a slender midface resembling modern humans. In 2007, a 1.2 to 1.1-million-year-old hominin jawbone (named ATE9-1) was found in the Sima del Elefante site in northern Spain but could not be conclusively assigned to H. antecessor.

In 2022, Rosa Huguet and colleagues uncovered the fossil remains of a partial hominin midface at the Sima del Elefante site. The fragments (dubbed ATE7-1 collectively) consist of a substantial part of the maxilla and the zygomatic bone from the left side of an adult individual. The authors used both physical evidence and 3D imaging techniques to reconstruct the fossil fragments, estimating their age to be between 1.4 and 1.1 million-years-old. The age of the newly discovered fossils is indistinguishable from the jawbone (ATE9-1) found at the site previously, although the ATE7-1 fossils were found two metres deeper, leading the authors to assume that the new fossils are older. The recovery of additional archaeological remains (stone tools and animal bones with cut marks) and paleocological remains from the site offer insights into the environment in which this hominin lived and their lifestyle, the authors note.

The authors observe that the hominin bone fragments do not display ‘modern’ mid-face features found in H. antecessor fossils. Additionally, although the remains bear some resemblance to the Homo erectus lineage, they are unable to conclusively assign it to this group either. Therefore, the authors provisionally assigned the fossils to H. aff. erectus, indicating an affinity to H. erectus, pending further evidence. This discovery could suggest that Western Europe was populated by at least two Homo species during the Early Pleistocene period: H. aff. erectus, and later H. antecessor. Further research and fossil samples are needed to investigate the relationship between these populations and further refine their classifications.