An Archaeologist Found a 1 Million-Year-Old Face
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Fragments of human facial bones that surfaced in northern Spain have been found to be 1.1 to 1.4 million years old, meaning that they are parts of the oldest human face in Western Europe.
The individual, now called 'Pink,' is thought to be more primitive than Homo antecessor—a hominin which lived in the area 800,000 to 900,000 years ago—and closer to Homo erectus.
Similarities between Pink and Homo erectus prompted scientists to give this new individual the name Homo 'affinis' erectus, though further research needs to be done to determine more about this face's morphology.
When a fragment of a skull emerged from a cave in northern Spain, archaeologist Rosa Huguet was almost certain it came from a human ancestor. What she didn't know at the time of the excavation was that she was coming face to face (pun intended) with the most ancient human visage in Western Europe. Huguet nicknamed the hominin 'Pink.'
The oldest faces on the European continent—which are also the most ancient outside of Africa—were unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, and belong to five 1.8 million-year-old skulls from a hominin group known as Homo georgicus, which is thought to be closely related to Homo erectus. When early humans arrived in the western part of Europe was less certain, until now. The cheek and upper jawbone fragments that Huguet and her team found in 2022 (and have been investigating since then) are between 1.1 and 1.4 million years old, making them the oldest human fossils in Western Europe.
'This finding enables us to not only learn about the facial morphology of early Europeans, but also increase our knowledge of the evolutionary history of our ancestors in Europe,' she said in a study recently published in Nature.
Before this discovery, the Iberian Peninsula was still the only region with any evidence of early human migration to Western Europe. The only other artifacts this ancient were a 1.1 miillion-year-old hominin jawbone (found at the same site in 2007), a slightly older tooth and finger bone from nearby, and several stone tools. But these had little to tell about human settlement and activity during the Early Pleistocene.
The next oldest human fossils are Homo antecessor bones (about 800,000 to 900,000 years old). These were also excavated from the site at which Pink was uncovered—known as Sima del Elefante—and Huguet observed that their facial morphology is much closer to that of modern humans than Pink's was. Homo antecessor shows an obvious difference in the section of bone just below the eye socket, which 'slopes down and backwards just like Homo sapiens,' as Huguet said in the study. The same part of Pink's face slopes forward, which is considered to be more primitive.
Something else that stood out about Pink was the side of the face, which was less arched than that of Homo antecessor. The upper jaw of Homo antecessor showed a bend that Pink's upper jawbone did not have. Pink also had a flatter nose and was missing a hollow area below the eye, and all these differences led Huguet to conclude that she was looking at a hominin further removed from modern humans than Homo antecessor.How did this face compare to Homo erectus and the Georgian skulls? Both of these hominins had pronounced differences from Pink on the sides of the face, with cheekbones that protruded outward more. Pink also had a narrower face than Homo erectus fossils from Africa and Asia. Despite this, it is still thought that Pink is closer to these faces than Homo antecessor, and is possibly a new hominin species that is now being called Homo 'affinis' erectus—a hominin close to Homo Erectus.
There are, literally and otherwise, many pieces missing from Pink's history. The researchers think that the hominin may fall somewhere in between Homo georgicus and Homo antecessor. It is also possible that Homo affinis erectus and Homo antecessor coexisted for a while, or that Pink's species vanished entirely before Homo antecessor appeared. Huguet plans on continuing with her research.
Either way, Pink is giving prehistoric Western Europe a new face.
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