Europe's Oldest Hominid Unearthed

摘要

A team working in the hills of northern Spain reported in March that a piece of jawbone unearthed there is the oldest remains of early humans yet found in Europe. The new fossil-two inches of mandible with several teeth attached, assigned to the species Homo antecessor-is about 1.2 million years old. It turned up in a cave at Atapuerca, one of the most active paleontologi-cal sites in the world. Thousands of hominid fossils up to 800,000 years old had been previously found there, including some bearing cut marks indicative of cannibalism.