In the summer of 2022, those responsible for the Atapuerca site, in Burgos, made known an important finding. It was about what seemed to be the face of the oldest hominid found throughout Europe and lived more than a million years ago in the north of the Peninsula.
Almost three years later, we know new details about this primitive human.
Pink. Details such as the name with which they have baptized the individual to whom these bones belonged: Pink. The study has corroborated the initial estimates of the team responsible for the finding, which at the time already pointed out that we are before the oldest human in Europe of which we have record.
The new estimates date the remains in a period between 1.4 and 1.1 million years ago in time. This implies that the fossil is several hundred thousand years before the oldest remains of the deposit (belonging to a HOMO predecessor), dated about 860,000 years ago.
A person related to erect. An important fact that still remains to be elucidated about the species belonged to this individual. The new work confirms that the individual did not belong to the species HOMO predecessoras the remains found in the Great Dolina. The specimen would have belonged to an old Man alert. That is why the remains have been classified in a “provisional” way as a member of the species A person related to erect.
“HOMO predecessorShare with Homo sapiens a more modern -looking face and the projection of the bones of the nose, while Pink’s face configuration is more primitive, with features that remember Man alertespecially in its nasal, flat and poorly developed structure, ”María Martinón-Torres, director of the CENIH, explained in a press release.
June 2022. The fragment was found by Edgar Téllez, a member of the Atapuerca research team, in June 2022. Cataloged as ATE7-1, the remains were found in the stratum TE7 of the elephant’s chasm.
After more than two years of analysis, the details of his study have been published in the form of an article in the magazine Nature.
Clues about a way of life.The TE7 level can give us important clues about the environment in which Pink developed. It has recovered stone tools and animal remains with cuts of cuts, which would have been used by these presumable human inhabitants of Atapuerca and Europe.
As explained by the team responsible for the study, these brands indicate that the inhabitants of Atapuerca in the lower Pleistocene not only knew the resources available in their environment, they were also able to take advantage of them “systematically”.
A piece of a huge puzzle. The finding is just one more piece in the huge puzzle of human evolution and the dissemination of gender species Homo throughout our planet. We know that various waves of several species left their original continent, Africa, towards Eurasia, but the routes that followed have been hidden over time.
Another important clue in this regard is precisely on a very different access route: Caucasus. A fossil gurpo found in Georgia were so far the only track of the adventures of the H. erectus out of Africa. The oldest hominile fossils found outside the African continent were five skulls with around 1.8 million years old.
These fossils were classified as H. erectusbut there are also certain doubts about this classification due to some important differences in their characteristics. This suggests, explains Ann Gibbons in an article in the magazine Sciencethat more than one species HomoI could have left Africa in this era. The Atapuerca fossil would not belong to this species strictly, and now it gives us a new clue with which to advance in the resolution of the enigma complex.
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Image | Iphes
