Fossil face found in Spanish cave belongs to first known Western European
On his first day digging in a Spanish cave in 2022, archaeology graduate student Edgar Téllez found something spectacular: a mud-covered facial bone with tooth roots intact. His colleague, archaeologist Rosa Huguet, took a look. “I was 95% sure we had found a human fossil, but I didn’t dare say it was human remains,” says Huguet, who is at the Research Centers of Catalonia’s Catalan Institute for Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution at Rovira i Virgii University. She hesitated in part because it was embedded in sediments more than 1.1 million years old, older than any other human fossil known in Western Europe. After cleaning and examining the fossil, the team of researchers was 100% certain. “The fossil represents the earliest human face of Western Europe,” says paleoanthropologist Maria Martinón-Torres, director of Spain’s National Human Evolution Research Centre...