Most of a human face found in northern Spain belongs to a primitive archaic human, marking the oldest known evidence of hominins in western Europe, anthropologists announced Wednesday. The facial remains are not those of Homo antecessor, an archaic human species whose roughly 900,000-year-old remains were previously found at the same site, according to the research. Rather, the facial fragments belong to Homoaffiniserectusand the finding, reported today in Nature, indicates that the human population in Europe turned over at the end of the Early Pleistocene. This paper introduces a new actor in the story of human evolution in Europe,Homo affinis erectus, said study co-author Rosa Huguet, a paleoanthropologist at the Institut Catal de Paleoecologia Humana i Evoluci Social, in a Nature press briefing. This finding allows us to accept that during the early Pleistocene, more than one early human species lived in Europe, and that the first hominid to inhabit western Europe was not Homo antecessor, as we previously believed. The Homoaffiniserectus fragment was discovered in 2022 and is between 1.1 million and 1.4 million years old. The fossil is the earliest human fossil so far found in western Europe, according to Mara Martinn-Torres, a researcher at Centro Nacional de Investigacon sobre la Evolucin Humana. The species name can be shortened toHomoaff.erectus. In taxonomy, aff. comes from the Latin affinis, meaning related to, and its often used to indicate a species closely related to another but not necessarily the same (in this case, a species very similar to, or possibly being, Homo erectusa human species that lived from about 2 million to 100,000 years ago thats believed to be one of our direct ancestors).The team nicknamed the fossil Pink, after Pink Floyd, referring to the bands albumThe Dark Side of the Moon. (In Spanish, La Cara Oculta de la Luna,withCara being interpreted as either side or face.) But thats not the only double meaningthe team also affectionately considers Pink a reference to the studys lead author, quoted above, as in Spanish, Rosa means pink. The facial fragmentwhich was found among about 6,000 fossil remains, including animal bones with cut marksbelonged to an early human that predated the Homo antecessor remains on a site less than 820 feet (250 meters) away by about half a million years. The discovery reveals aspects of hominin migration and evolution farther back in time than other hominin remains from Europe.A small animal rib with cut marks found on the site. Graphic: Nature / Maria D. Guilln / IPHES-CERCA. Its evident that about one million years ago there was a replacement in the European population, said Jos Mara Bermdez de Castro, a CENIEH paleoanthropologist and co-author of the paper, during the same briefing. A species, possibly related to Homo erectus, would have given way toHomo antecessor. Homoaff. erectushas more primitive facial featuresspecifically in the area of the cheeksthanHomo antecessor, Martinn-Torres added, with the latters mid-face region bearing resemblance to our (Homo sapiens) features. Whereas our face and that ofH. antecessor is vertical and flat,Homoaff.erectus face projects forward, similar toHomo erectus specimens. Hence the species assignmentthe team does not commit to labelling the individualHomo erectus, but recognizes similarities with the more well-known hominid group, though the team cannot conclusively assign it toHomo erectus. It may be an entirely different species. The next challenge for the teamis to find more fossils that clarify the identity of Homoaff. erectus, its relationship to other hominin species, and perhaps explain why the population gave way to Homo antecessor.The population is a snapshot of the groups that entered Europe when the climatic conditions allowed, Martinn-Torres said.These populations are different from the earliest hominins that have been documented outside Africa, she added, referring to the Dmanisi hominins from Georgia, adding that the newly identified human group is Somewhere in an evolutionary space in between the earliest hominins found outside Africarepresented by the Dmanisi homininsand Homo antecessor. Though the team is not certain that the specimen isHomo erectus, Martinn-Torres added that it is the closest thing toHomo erectus yet found in Europe.The archaeological work at Sima del Elefante. Photo: Maria D. Guilln / IPHES-CERCA. Its been a heady week for human origins research. Yesterday, a team of paleoanthropologists found evidence of similar behaviors in Neanderthal and early modern human groups that inhabited the Levant around 100,000 years agolong afterHomoaff.erectus andHomo antecessor disappeared. Neanderthals are also now gonebut they were such close relatives of our own species that the two groups interbred, and Neanderthal DNA persists in our genomes today. The teams next steps are to keep excavatingtheyve yet to work into the deepest layers of the Sima del Elefante site where the Homoaff.erectus face was found. It is remarkable that the Pleistocenean epoch so recent in Earths historyhosted such a diversity of hominins in a region as small as western Europe, even though they were separated by hundreds of thousands of years.Though the newly described bone fragments do not totally resolve aspects of our evolutionary originsif anything, they further complicate the narrativethey contribute to an increasingly remarkable and complex story of how our species emerged from a diversity of hominin groups and covered the Earth with a population of 8 billion strong.