Author: Laura Martín-Francés, Postdoctoral Fellow, PalaeoDiet Research Lab, Monash University

In a system of caves in the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain, nearly 50 years of systematic archaeological excavations have unearthed evidence of increasingly ancient human occupation. The result of this systematic work has yielded human traces stretching from the Bronze Age to hundreds of thousands of years into the past – before modern humans like us (Homo sapiens) even existed. In new research published in Nature, our team shares another find from Atapuerca: the earliest human remains ever found in Western Europe. We discovered fragments of face bones from a species of extinct human previously unknown in this region, dating…