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 Elefante site has not been conclusively linked to H. antecessor or any other species. According to new findings led by researchers at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA), an incomplete set of sinus and cheekbone fossils excavated in 2022 suggests another group likely beat H. antecessor to Western Europe.
Paleoarcheologists discovered the remains officially known as ATE7-1 (aka 'Pink') in 2022 roughly 6.5 feet deeper than the previously excavated jawbone. Because of its location, the team estimates that Pink is 1.4 to 1.1 million years old. This makes Pink the oldest human ancestor ever found in Western Europe. Researchers also found additional relics like stone tools made from flint and quartz, as well as animal bones displaying cut marks. Taken altogether, the items offer insight into the life and habits at the time.
'Although the quartz and flint tools found are simple, they suggest an effective subsistence strategy and highlight the hominins' ability to exploit the resources available in their environment,' Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez, a study co-author and lithic materials specialist, said in a statement.
The team worked over the next two years to conserve and carefully reconstruct the bone fragments using advanced imaging and 3D analysis tools. While the fossils aren't a complete set, experts determined they composed large portions of the left side maxilla and zygomatic bones. Following further analysis, it soon became evident that Pink wasn't a member of the H. antecessor family at all.
'Homo antecessor shares with Homo sapiens a more modern-looking face and a prominent nasal bone structure, whereas Pink's facial features are more primitive, resembling Homo erectus, particularly in its flat and underdeveloped nasal structure,' explained María Martinón-Torres, director of Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) and a lead researcher.
But while Pink's remains don't match its more modern H. antecessor relatives, researchers stopped short of identifying them as belonging to the H. erectus family. Because of this, they assigned the fossils to H. aff. erectus, which suggests its Homo erectus identity is pending additional research and evidence. Regardless, the discovery makes clear that Western Europe was home to at least two Homo species during the Early Pleistocene. Whatever hominin Pink ends up being, their final resting place highlights humanity's complex, interconnected evolutionary journey to today.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Physicists Actually Made The 'World's Smallest Violin' For a Serious Reason
You may hear references to playing the world's smallest violin when someone is being overly whiny or wallowing in self-pity, and now scientists have turned the joke into an actual microscopic object. Physicists at Loughborough University in the UK deployed the latest in nanolithography techniques – etching patterns into materials at the smallest possible scales – to create a violin drawing that's just 13 microns wide. That's thinner than a human hair, which are typically up to 180 microns in diameter. This is essentially just a drawing rather than an instrument, and you would have to be a tiny tardigrade to play it anyway, but the novel creation demonstrates ways in which the next generation of electronic devices could be made. "Once we understand how materials behave, we can start applying that knowledge to develop new technologies, whether it's improving computing efficiency or finding new ways to harvest energy," says experimental physicist Kelly Morrison, from Loughborough University. "But first, we need to understand the fundamental science, and this system enables us to do just that." The violin was made through a four-step process. First, an incredibly fine, heated needle was used to draw the violin pattern into a chip coated with a polymer. Second, the part of the polymer that's been written on is dissolved. The third stage is filling the newly formed cavity in the polymer with platinum, which is the material the violin is actually made from. The fourth and final step is removing the chip and the rest of the polymer, leaving behind the violin. It's not unlike the process of screen printing, where ink is pressed through a stencil to create a picture on the underlying layer – though in this case the scale is much, much smaller, and the equipment is much, much more sophisticated. This is a seriously delicate process, and requires equipment that takes up a whole room. The setup includes a sculpting machine called a NanoFrazor, which is enclosed in a glove box to keep out dust and other particles. "I'm really excited about the level of control and possibilities we have with the setup," says Morrison. "I'm looking forward to seeing what I can achieve – but also what everyone else can do with the system." More ambitious research is now planned for the NanoFrazor and its connected software, work that will involve different materials and different methods of customizing them at the smallest possible scales. And any time that improvements in miniaturization are made, they have implications for technologies including computing. For now, this is certainly the smallest violin that we've ever come across – continuing the tradition of the phrase thought to have first been popularized by a mention in the TV series M*A*S*H back in the 1970s. "Though creating the world's smallest violin may seem like fun and games, a lot of what we've learned in the process has actually laid the groundwork for the research we're now undertaking," says Morrison. "Our nanolithography system allows us to design experiments that probe materials in different ways – using light, magnetism, or electricity – and observe their responses." Spiral Magnetism Seen in Synthetic Crystal For The First Time We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For Nearly 300 Years Big Bang May Not Be The Beginning of Everything, New Theory Suggests
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
Astronomers left puzzled by high-altitude clouds forming on young planet
Should humans ever venture to a particular planet that circles a sun-like star in the constellation of the fly, they would do well to keep an eye on the weather. The thick slabs of cloud that blot the planet's skies are mostly made from mineral dust, but astronomers suspect there may be iron in them, too, which would rain down on the world below when the clouds break. Astronomers spotted the high-altitude clouds when they trained the James Webb space telescope (JWST) on the young star system, which lies 307 light years away in the deep southern sky. The star, YSES-1, is a newbie by cosmic standards, a mere 1m years old compared with the 4.6bn-year-old sun. The star is circled by two gas giants, both still forming and both larger than Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. Related: Astronomers find signal that gives 'unexpected' insight into early universe Dr Kielan Hoch, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said the planetary system's youth made it a prime target for astronomers to learn more about the early evolution of planets around faraway stars. 'There's a small handful of multiplanet systems that have been directly imaged,' Hoch said. 'And they are a unique laboratory to test planet formation theories as they formed in the same environment.' 'Both planets are still forming, which is why they are still bright enough for us to detect,' she added. 'The light we are seeing is from their formation as they begin to shrink and condense.' When the team began their observations they were surprised to find both planets in the telescope's field of view, giving them information on two worlds for the price of one. The outer planet, YSES-1c, is the smaller of the two worlds, and about six times the mass of Jupiter. The telescope revealed high-altitude clouds in the planet's atmosphere, but instead of being made from water vapour as on Earth, the clouds consist of magnesium silicate dust grains and perhaps some iron. 'The iron would indeed precipitate out,' Hoch said. The astronomers described the observations as the first direct detection of such clouds on a planet circling a sun-like star. Further data revealed a disc of material made up of trillions of tonnes of dust particles around the larger inner world, YSES-1b, about 14 times the mass of Jupiter. The findings were published in Nature. Hoch said the disc around the inner planet was a 'puzzle for formation theories' since both planets must have formed in the same environment. 'Why did YSES-1b hold on to material around it while YSES-1c did not?' she said. An added mystery is why a 16m-year-old planet still has a disk of material swirling around it. Astronomers' theories of planet formation suggest that any encircling dust should have settled after the first 5m years. 'We wouldn't expect the planets to look so different from one another if they formed in the same protoplanetary disk,' Hoch said. 'JWST is providing an immense amount of data to continue to refine models and improve our understanding.' The $10bn telescope has transformed astronomy since it launched in December 2021 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. The flagship mission has peered back to the first galaxies that lit up the cosmos, spied strange new worlds, and witnessed black holes colliding. It has even spotted tantalising, if controversial, hints of life beyond Earth.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
Penguin population decline may be worse than "worst-case projections"
Emperor penguin populations in Antartica may be declining faster than the most pessimistic predictions, scientists said after analyzing satellite images of a key part of the continent. The images, spanning from 2009 to 2024, suggest a decline of 22% in the Antarctic Peninsula, Weddell Sea and Bellingshausen Sea, according to researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and University of Southampton, who published their study in Nature on Tuesday. The 16 emperor penguin colonies in that part of Antartica represent a third of the global population. The estimated decline compares to an earlier estimate of a 9.5% reduction across Antarctica as a whole between 2009 and 2018. The researchers now have to see if their assessment in that region of Antartica is true for the rest of the continent. "There's quite a bit of uncertainty in this type of work and what we've seen in this new count isn't necessarily symbolic of the rest of the continent," Dr. Peter Fretwell, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. "But if it is — that's worrying because the decline is worse than the worst-case projections we have for emperors this century." While further analysis is needed, Fretwell told Agence France-Presse the colonies studied were considered representative. Researchers know that climate change is driving the losses, but the speed of the declines is a particular cause for alarm. Warming is thinning and destabilizing the ice under the penguins' feet in their breeding grounds. In recent years some colonies have lost all their chicks because the ice has given way beneath them, plunging hatchlings into the sea before they were old enough to cope with the freezing ocean. Fretwell said the new research suggests penguin numbers have been declining since the monitoring began in 2009. That is even before global warming was having a major impact on the sea ice, which forms over open water adjacent to land in the region. But he said the culprit is still likely to be climate change, with warming driving other challenges for the penguins, such as higher rainfall or increasing encroachment from predators. "Emperor penguins are probably the most clear-cut example of where climate change is really showing its effect," Fretwell said. "There's no fishing. There's no habitat destruction. There's no pollution which is causing their populations to decline. It's just the temperatures in the ice on which they breed and live, and that's really climate change." Emperor penguins number about a quarter of a million breeding pairs, all in Antarctica, according to a 2020 study. A baby emperor penguin emerges from an egg kept warm in winter by a male, while the female in a breeding pair embarks on a two-month fishing expedition. When she returns to the colony, she feeds the hatchling by regurgitating and then both parents take turns to forage. To survive on their own, chicks must develop waterproof feathers, a process that typically starts in mid-December. The new research uses high resolution satellite imagery during the months of October and November, before the region is plunged into winter darkness. Fretwell said future research could use other types of satellite monitoring, like radar or thermal imaging, to capture populations in the darker months, as well as expand to the other colonies. He said there is hope that the penguins may go further south to colder regions in the future but added that it is not clear "how long they're going to last out there." Computer models have projected that the species will be near extinction by the end of the century if humans do not slash their planet-heating emissions. The latest study suggests the picture could be even worse. "We may have to rethink those models now with this new data," said Fretwell. But he stressed there was still time to reduce the threat to the penguins. "We've got this really depressing picture of climate change and falling populations even faster than we thought but it's not too late," he said. "We're probably going to lose a lot of emperor penguins along the way, but if people do change, and if we do reduce or turn around our climate emissions, then then we will save the emperor penguin." Australian reporter covering Los Angeles protests shot with rubber bullet by police officer LAPD chief speaks out about deployment of military forces to anti-ICE protests Can Trump deploy National Guard without governor's approval?
