Spanish Oddities
Fossil of the first European found at Atapuerca dig, Spain
By m.p.
Mar 26, 2008 - 8:24 PM

Archaeologists at the Atapuerca dig, the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Sierras east of Burgos, have unearthed the oldest human fossils ever discovered in western Europe. A jawbone and teeth found in the Sima del Elefante are said to be up to 1.2 million years old, and have been provisionally assigned to ‘Homo antecessor,’ the name given to what some scientists believe is a new species identified from fossils found in the Gran Dolina dig in Atapuerca in the 1990s.

Those remains were dated at 800,000 years old, and were until now, El Mundo reports, the oldest fossilised evidence of human presence in Europe. Homo antecessor is believed to be a possible ancestor to Neanderthal man.

The find, from June last year, is presented in the journal ‘Nature,’ and, as Eudald Carbonell, co-director of the excavations said, ‘is linked by its anatomical characteristics to the ‘homo georgicus’ populations found in Dmanisi in Georgia, at the gateway to Europe, dated 1.8 million years ago.’ ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the fossil of the first European.’