|
Madrid: A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.
The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.
Subject of controversy
The new find appears to be from the same species, researchers said.
A team co-led by Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution, reported their find in yesterday's issue of the scientific journal Nature.
The timing of the earliest occupation of Europe by humans who emerged from Africa has been controversial for many years.
Some archaeologists believe the process was a stop-and-go one in which species of hominins - a group that includes the extinct relatives of modern humans - emerged and died out quickly only to be replaced by others, making for a very slow spread across the continent, Carbonell said in an interview.
Until now the oldest hominin fossils found in Europe were the Homo antecessor ones, also found at Atapuerca, but at a separate digging site, and a skull from Ceprano in Italy.
Carbonell's team has tentatively classified the new fossil as representing an earlier example of Homo antecessor. And, critically, the team says the new one also bears similarities to much-older fossils dug up since 1983 in the Caucasus at a place called Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. These were dated as being up to 1.8 million years old.
"This leads us to a very important, very interesting conclusion," Carbonell said. It is this: that hominins which emerged from Africa and settled in the Caucasus eventually evolved into Homo antecessor, and that the latter populated Europe not 800,000 years ago, but at least 1.3 million years ago. This discovery of a 1.3 million-year-old fossil shows the process was accelerated and continuous; that the occupation of Europe happened very early and much faster than we had thought."
Solid dating work
Chris Stringer, a leading researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and not involved in the project, said Carbonell's team had done solid dating work to estimate the antiquity of the new Atapuerca fossil by employing three separate techniques - some researchers only use one or two - including a relatively new one that measures radioactive decay of sediments.
"This is a well-dated site, as much as any site that age can be," Stringer said.
But he also expressed some caution about Carbonell's conclusions.
First of all, the newly found jawbone fragment preserves a section not seen in the equivalent pieces found at Atapuerca in 1997. So assigning both to the same species must be provisional, Stringer said.
And on the broader issue of tracing the new fossil back to the species unearthed at Dmanisi, Stringer wondered how a piece of a jawbone could explain away half-a-million years.
Carbonell says that with the finding of human fossils 1.3 million years old in Europe, researchers can now expect to find older ones, even up to 1.8 million years old, in other parts of the continent.
"This has to be the next discovery," he said. "This is the scientific hypothesis."
This discovery of a 1.3 million-year-old fossil shows the process was accelerated and continuous; that the occupation of Europe happened very early and much faster than we had thought."
|
