Scientists Discover Western Europe’s Oldest Face—and a Previously Unknown Human Group

Most of a human face found in northern Spain belongs to a primitive archaic human, marking the oldest known evidence of hominins in western Europe, anthropologists announced Wednesday.

The facial remains are not those of Homo antecessor, an archaic human species whose roughly 900,000-year-old remains were previously found at the same site, according to the research. Rather, the facial fragments belong to Homo affinis erectus—and the finding, reported today in Nature, indicates that the human population in Europe turned over at the end of the Early Pleistocene.

“This paper introduces a new actor in the story of human evolution in Europe, Homo affinis erectus,” said study co-author Rosa Huguet, a paleoanthropologist at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social, in a Nature press briefing. “This finding allows us to accept that during the early Pleistocene, more than one early human species lived in Europe, and that the first hominid to inhabit western Europe was not Homo antecessor, as we previously believed.”

The Homo affinis erectus fragment was discovered in 2022 and is between 1.1 million and 1.4 million years old. The fossil is the earliest human fossil so far found in western Europe, according to María Martinón-Torres, a researcher at Centro Nacional de Investigacíon sobre la Evolución Humana.

The species’ name can be shortened to Homo aff. erectus. In taxonomy, “aff.” comes from the Latin affinis, meaning “related to,” and it’s often used to indicate a species closely related to another but not necessarily the same (in this case, a species very similar to, or possibly being, Homo erectus—a human species that lived from about 2 million to 100,000 years ago that’s believed to be one of our direct ancestors).

The team nicknamed the fossil Pink, after Pink Floyd, referring to the band’s album The Dark Side of the Moon. (In Spanish, La Cara Oculta de la Luna, with Cara being interpreted as either “side” or “face.”) But that’s not the only double meaning—the team also affectionately considers Pink a reference to the study’s lead author, quoted above, as in Spanish, “Rosa” means pink.

The facial fragment—which was found among about 6,000 fossil remains, including animal bones with cut marks—belonged to an early human that predated the Homo antecessor remains on a site less than 820 feet (250 meters) away by about half a million years. The discovery reveals aspects of hominin migration and evolution farther back in time than other hominin remains from Europe.

“It’s evident that about one million years ago there was a replacement in the European population,” said José María Bermúdez de Castro, a CENIEH paleoanthropologist and co-author of the paper, during the same briefing. “A species, possibly related to Homo erectus, would have given way to Homo antecessor.”

Homo aff. erectus has more primitive facial features—specifically in the area of the cheeks—than Homo antecessor, Martinón-Torres added, with the latter’s mid-face region bearing resemblance to our (Homo sapiens) features. Whereas our face and that of H. antecessor is vertical and flat, Homo aff. erectus‘ face projects forward, similar to Homo erectus specimens. Hence the species assignment—the team does not commit to labelling the individual Homo erectus, but recognizes similarities with the more well-known hominid group, though the team cannot conclusively assign it to Homo erectus. It may be an entirely different species.

The next challenge for the team is to find more fossils that clarify the identity of Homo aff. erectus, its relationship to other hominin species, and perhaps explain why the population gave way to Homo antecessor. The population is a “snapshot” of the groups that entered Europe when the climatic conditions allowed, Martinón-Torres said.

“These populations are different from the earliest hominins that have been documented outside Africa,” she added, referring to the Dmanisi hominins from Georgia, adding that the newly identified human group is “Somewhere in an evolutionary space in between the earliest hominins found outside Africa—represented by the Dmanisi hominins—and Homo antecessor.”

Though the team is not certain that the specimen is Homo erectus, Martinón-Torres added that it is the closest thing to Homo erectus yet found in Europe.

It’s been a heady week for human origins research. Yesterday, a team of paleoanthropologists found evidence of similar behaviors in Neanderthal and early modern human groups that inhabited the Levant around 100,000 years ago—long after Homo aff. erectus and Homo antecessor disappeared. Neanderthals are also now gone—but they were such close relatives of our own species that the two groups interbred, and Neanderthal DNA persists in our genomes today.

The team’s next steps are to keep excavating—they’ve yet to work into the deepest layers of the Sima del Elefante site where the Homo aff. erectus face was found.

It is remarkable that the Pleistocene—an epoch so recent in Earth’s history—hosted such a diversity of hominins in a region as small as western Europe, even though they were separated by hundreds of thousands of years.

Though the newly described bone fragments do not totally resolve aspects of our evolutionary origins—if anything, they further complicate the narrative—they contribute to an increasingly remarkable and complex story of how our species emerged from a diversity of hominin groups and covered the Earth with a population of 8 billion strong.