Live Science
By Kristina Killgrove
March 12, 2025
Fragments of a skull found in Spain reveal that human ancestors arrived in Western Europe far earlier than previously thought, a new study finds.
The bones were discovered in a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains that was already known as a spot used by Homo antecessor, the species that Neanderthals likely evolved from. But the new bones are hundreds of thousands of years older and shaped differently, suggesting that Homo erectus — an ancestor of modern humans — also lived in Europe during the Early Pleistocene (2.6 million to 800,000 years ago).