Anthropologists delving into a cave in northeastern Spain announced on Wednesday they had uncovered the earliest known remains of a human in Europe, a find that they dated to as much as 1.2 million years old.
The fossil strengthens the theory that humans, after emerging from their African home, struck out towards western Europe far earlier than thought, they said.
The find comprises teeth and part of a lower jawbone about 4cm across, found in the Atapuerca hills east of the city of Burgos, the team reported in the weekly British science journal Nature.
The site, called the Sima del Elefante, comprises a cave 18m deep and 15m wide, with sediment and debris from ancient human settlement, bats and other animals forming layers many meters deep.
The soil layer at which the fossil was found has been dated to around 1.1 million to 1.2 million years ago, using carbon isotope decay and paleo-magnetism, in which reversals in Earth's magnetic field leave a weak signal in rocks, providing a timetable of the past.
Other items included the bones of long-extinct species of weasels and mice and Stone Age tools to shape flints.
The investigators, led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalonian Institute of Human Paleo-ecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, believe the fossil is that of a Homo antecessor, a hominid branch that could be a forerunner to Homo sapiens and their enigmatic cousins, the Neanderthals.
His hypothesis -- drawn from evidence from other Early Pleistocene sites on the Mediterranean -- is that the humans who settled in Spain migrated there from eastern Europe.
This is in line with the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, by which humans left their ancestral home in eastern Africa and headed into the Middle East and the Caucasus before turning westwards into Europe and eastwards into South Asia.
The earliest remains of a human outside the cradle of Africa have been found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and have been dated to around 1.8 million years.
Until now, many anthropologists have believed that the westward migration into Europe was slow and cautious, as humans tentatively entered unknown territory.
Until 1995, there was no direct evidence that hominids had walked in Europe earlier than 500,000 years ago.
That changed with the discovery of remains of H. antecessor at nearby caves in Atapuerca that were were 800,000 years old.
Evidence is starting to build a convincing case that the migration "occurred much faster and in a more continuous manner than previously thought," the paper said.
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