1.4-million-year-old bones deepen mystery of who reached Europe first
The partial jawbone from a human ancestor nicknamed “Pink” is helping rewrite the history of hominin migration into Western Europe. Researchers believe that Pink represents the oldest archaic fossils ever found in this region, according to a study published in Nature on March 12. The exciting fossils also indicate that at least two subspecies lived in the region during the Early Pleistocene, roughly 1.4 to 1.1 million years ago. While experts haven’t confirmed Pink’s exact hominin species just yet, they may belong to our famous evolutionary relative, Homo erectus. Hominins began migrating into Eurasia at least 1.8 million years ago, but the first to do so remains unclear. Paleoarcheologists previously matched a set of roughly 850,000-year-old fossils in Spain to Homo antecessor, an early human subspecies that displayed thinner facial features similar to modern Homo sapiens. However, a 1.2 to 1.1-million-year-old hominin jawbone discovered in 2007 at the country’s Sima del...