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Bones show humans in Europe 1.2 mln years ago: study - Yahoo! News

MADRID (Reuters) - Early humans may have roamed Europe as much as 1.2 million years ago, far earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday, based on fossils they found in northern Spain.

Researchers excavated a jaw bone, teeth and simple tools in a cave near the city of Burgos dated around 400,000 years older than the previously oldest-known remains found at a nearby site 14 years ago, a paper published in the journal Nature said.

The remains are accurately dated and lay to rest doubts about when early humans first lived in Europe, said Andreu Olle, who has worked at the Atapuerca site since 1990.

"These are the oldest human remains in Europe. With this fossil, we can say it (Europe) was populated earlier than was thought," he told Reuters.

The bones are similar to fossils thought to be 800,000 years old found at the same site in 1994, suggesting a continuous human presence in Western Europe.

Up to now archaeologists had found evidence of human activity in Spain, France and Italy around 1 million years ago but no human remains, only animal bones and stone tools.

Scientists generally agree that modern humans spread out of Africa starting about 50,000 years ago, quickly establishing Stone Age cultures throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.

However the fossil, thought to be from the "Homo antecessor" species, would have shared common ancestors with modern man and may have mixed with the more recent newcomers from Africa.

Flakes of flint embedded in animal bones, suggesting the use of a crude knife, were amongst the finds discovered at the site last June.

The find adds weight to the theory that early humans spread from Africa via the Middle East, not across the Straits of Gibraltar separating Africa from Europe, because the jaw was a similar shape to one unearthed in the central Asian country of Georgia thought to be 1.7 million years old.

We can't really draw any conclusions until they identify the species of human they've found. If it's Homo neanderthalensis or Homo erectus, then that'd just about kill the "Out of Africa" theory. If it's Homo sapiens, then that'd just be weired, and would damage the theory that we are the latest in the evolutionary chain theory (and would alternatively give credit to the idea that each species developed independently and was wiped out by the next in the chain instead of just mutating and evolving into a new species).

I'm thinking, however, it'll probably be a new species, possibly of Homo erectus likeness. Or perhaps it's one in a series of missing links between the various species of human.

could be a Homo saipens, Homo Neanderthales hybrid, one of the earlyest maybe

Originally Posted by Flawless Cowboy

could be a Homo saipens, Homo Neanderthales hybrid, one of the earlyest maybe

To put it eloquently, they're bound to have fucked at least once during the brief period of interaction between sapiens and neanderthalensis.

I know very little about the biology of different species but Mule = donkey + Horse comes to mind.
What astonishes me is if we've been around that long then most of the modern age advances in science and technology and elimination of superstition and ignorance (yeah not all of it but a lot of it) seem to have occurred in the 19th and 20th centurys which is a tiny percentage of time out of the whole historical experience of a million years or a few hundred thousand years depending upon what you choose to believe.

Originally Posted by streetwise

I know very little about the biology of different species but Mule = donkey + Horse comes to mind.
What astonishes me is if we've been around that long then most of the modern age advances in science and technology and elimination of superstition and ignorance (yeah not all of it but a lot of it) seem to have occurred in the 19th and 20th centurys which is a tiny percentage of time out of the whole historical experience of a million years or a few hundred thousand years depending upon what you choose to believe.

I view it kind of differently. I see the development of science and technology as gradual with each advancement building on previous advancements.

Today, with computers, modern medicine, and genetic engineering, early achievements may seem kind of simple but really they're no less significant. Without those early advances, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Originally Posted by Evil

I view it kind of differently. I see the development of science and technology as gradual with each advancement building on previous advancements.

Today, with computers, modern medicine, and genetic engineering, early achievements may seem kind of simple but really they're no less significant. Without those early advances, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Well I think there were long periods of dark ages when nothing happened and everything was repressed. But I dont see much advancement more than 5 thousand years ago. If there was a million years before that, I'd like to know what exactly humanity was doing in that period:crazy: