Scientists have put a face, but not an official name, to the earliest human ancestor ever found in Western Europe.
This newly discovered hominin is a “new actor in the story of human evolution,” says excavation coordinator Rosa Huguet, from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain.
The partial ‘portrait’ of this prehistoric individual is formed from the left side of a jaw and cheekbone uncovered in 2022 at the famous archaeological complex of Atapuerca in northern Spain.
After years of work, an international team of experts has dated the precious bones to between 1.1 and 1.4 million years old. When reconstructed, the remains create a narrow, flat face with fewer modern features than experts were expecting.
The face doesn’t look like any other human species found at this time and in this part of the world.
That’s partly why the individual is nicknamed Pink. In Spanish, the word for ‘face’ is the same as ‘side,’ and so researchers named the half-faced hominin in homage to Pink Floyd’s iconic album, Dark Side of the Moon.
The name also serves as an unofficial hat tip to a key leader of the Atapuerca excavation, Rosa (Spanish for ‘pink’) Huguet.
Atapuerca is home to the oldest evidence of humans in Western Europe. Before Pink, the earliest remains belonged to the species Homo antecessor, which dates to between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago and has a surprisingly similar face to that of modern humans.
Even though Pink was found at a neighboring site to H. antecessor, this individual’s flat features and underdeveloped nose are more reminiscent of Homo erectus – the first humans to leave Africa, use fire, and make advanced tools.
The findings suggest Pink belonged to an overlooked, older species that arrived in Western Europe before H. antecessor. Both species may have overlapped in time and space, or they may have just missed each other.
“The evidence is still insufficient for a definitive classification, which is why it has been assigned to Homo affinis erectus (H. aff. erectus),” explains María Martinón-Torres, director of CENIEH and a lead researcher of the Atapuerca Project.
“This designation acknowledges Pink’s affinities with Homo erectus while leaving open the possibility that it may belong to another species.”
Martinón-Torres suspects Pink’s ancestors came from eastern Europe and not across the Gibraltar strait from Africa, as more archaeological evidence is scattered along the former migratory path.
The earliest evidence of human activity at the “gates of Europe” dates back to around 2 million years ago, which leaves plenty of time for waves of early human migrants to make it to Western Europe by the Early Pleistocene.
Previous archaeological evidence has found signs of early human tools and a single tooth in Western Europe dating to around 1.4 million years ago, however, additional human remains from this time have proved elusive.
The Atapuerca complex in Spain could help us understand who these first inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were, what they looked like, and where they lived.
At the site where Pink was found, researchers also uncovered stone tools and animal remains with cut marks on them. This suggests H. affinis erectus knew how to make simple yet effective tools to exploit the wet and warm region’s resources.
Researchers working at the Atapuerca complex have noticed a ‘chronological gap’ between the site where Pink was found (called Sima del Elefante) and the neighboring spot where H. antecessor was found (called Gran Dolina).
Some of the authors have argued this discontinuity represents a “depopulation” of the Iberian Peninsula, possibly because of extreme climate changes.
Perhaps there was a significant decline in populations of H. affinis erectus around this time, leaving the landscape open to a new wave of early hominin migrants. Genetic research suggests there was a bottleneck in human diversity around 900,000 years ago, which also aligns with a substantial gap in African and Eurasian fossil records.
With many questions left to answer, excavations of the Sima del Elefante site continue.
“This discovery heralds another prodigious era for the Atapuerca Project,” says José María Bermúdez de Castro, co-director of the Atapuerca Project and co-author of the study.
The study was published in Nature.
