Archaeological excavation work at level TE7 of the Sima del Elefante (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain). (Maria D. Guillen/Iphes-Cerca)
Researchers have determined that fossilized bone fragments found in a cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountains of Northern Spain come from the earliest known face in Western Europe, which belonged to a hominin estimated to be 1.1 million to 1.4 million years old, archaeologists reported Wednesday.
Discovered in 2022, the portions of the left side of an adult face belong to a hominin dubbed “Pink” after the rock band Pink Floyd. The bones from Pink significantly predate those of Homo antecessor, the oldest hominin species previously found at the site, according to the authors of a study in the journal Nature.
Hominins are the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species and all our immediate ancestors.
“This paper introduces a new actor in the story of human evolution in Europe,” Rosa Huguet, one of the authors of the Nature study, said at a news conference announcing the results of two years of research into the facial fragments.
Pink appears not to fit neatly into the known hominin species, and has been classified for now as Homo affinis erectus, meaning closely related to Homo erectus, Latin for “upright man.”
“Homo antecessor shares with Homo sapiens a more modern looking face and a prominent nasal bone structure, whereas Pink’s facial features are more primitive, resembling Homo erectus, particularly in its flat and underdeveloped nasal structure,” explained María Martinón-Torres, another of the authors, and director of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (National Research Center on Human Evolution) in Burgos, Spain.
Martinón-Torres said the designation Homo affinis erectus, “leaves open the possibility that [Pink] may belong to another species.”
The Atapuerca archeological site, first discovered during construction of a railway trench cut into limestone at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, has been systematically excavated since 1978, revealing ancient human skulls and some of the earliest evidence of cannibalism ever found.
Pink’s remains were uncovered in a cave on the site called Sima del Elefante, Spanish for “Pit of the Elephant.” At the same level of the cave, researchers uncovered stone tools and animal remains with cut marks.
Homo affinis erectus occupied a humid forest landscape with water coursing through the area near the cave, Huguet said. “It was a wetter, more temperate climate than now.”
John Hawks, chairman of the department of anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, called it a “really cool paper.” He added: “It’s always great to see a new fossil of course, but in this case the fossil helps add something to our knowledge of how some of the first human relatives in Europe were connected to other places.”
Comparisons in the paper, Hawks said, all support the idea that the latest hominin found in the Sima del Elefante “was a kind of relative of Homo erectus fossils found much further to the east, as far as Indonesia, as well as in their first homeland of Africa.”
The discovery of evidence that different hominin populations occupied Western Europe during the early Pleistocene epoch “suggests that this region was a key point in the evolutionary history of the genus Homo,” said Eudald Carbonell, another author of the Nature paper and co-director of the Atapuerca Project, which examines human evolution based on evidence found primarily at the site. The early Pleistocene epoch extends from about 2.6 million years ago to 781,000 years ago.
Martinón-Torres said Pink occupied an evolutionary space between the oldest known hominins found in South Africa — estimated to be 3.4 million to 3.7 million years old — and Homo antecessor, which is approximately about 860,000 years old. She said “most of the evidence” reinforces the theory that the hominins found in Atapuerca came to Spain from Eastern Europe.
The discoveries detailed in Nature represent the efforts of a large multidisciplinary team and dozens of workers who extracted several tons of sediment at the site.
The research team has more fieldwork to do, including the excavation of lower levels of Sima del Elefante, said Martinón-Torres.
“So who knows, we may have more surprises,” she said.