Science
A large collection of ancient fossils — including 17 complete skulls — found in a cave in Spain has yielded the oldest known ancestors of Neanderthals, scientists said Thursday, complicating the picture of how the ancient species may have evolved.
Paleontologists pieced together the skulls using 6,500 fossil fragments from at least 28 humans dated at 430,000 years old and discovered in a cave, Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of Bones”), in Atapuerca, Spain. The fossils were discovered 30 years ago, but scientists recently conducted a new analysis of several of the skulls using techniques that became available only in recent years — and discovered that the remains were about 100,000 years younger than previously thought.
And in a new paper published in the journal Science, paleontologists said that these ancient humans shared some key characteristics with Neanderthals — particularly their strong and prominent jaws and teeth — and that they also shared other characteristics with more primitive humans. The findings lend credence to the theory that the ancient Neanderthal species evolved gradually and that multiple species and subspecies of Neanderthals may have co-existed.
“It is now clear that the full suite of Neanderthal characteristics did not evolve at the same pace,” paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga, a professor at Complutense University in Madrid and lead author of the paper, told reporters on Thursday.
He compared this theory of Neanderthal evolution with a premise of the HBO show “Game of Thrones,” with multiple co-existing “kingdoms” of Neanderthals battling it out and replacing other species or subspecies multiple times, rather than just one group of Neanderthals that eventually lost out to modern-day humans.
“Hominin evolution was not a peaceful and boring process of very slow change throughout time and across an immense land,” he told reporters.
During various periods, when thick layers of ice spread over parts of Eurasia, the different subspecies had to decide whether to migrate south or go extinct, he explained. “In those times, as in the popular saga, winter was coming. And winter came many times,” he said.
While the scientists said they need to examine more fossils from other sites before they can speculate further, “given the present state of knowledge, we think that the ‘Game of Thrones’ scenario probably describes hominin evolution in Eurasia and Africa in the Middle Pleistocene period,” Arsuaga said.
The Middle Pleistocene runs from 780,000 to 130,000 years ago, during which scientists believe that a group of people split off from others living in Africa and East Asia and settled in Eurasia, evolving into the Neanderthal lineage of humans.
This discovery shows that Neanderthals may have first developed the facial and teeth characteristics related to chewing, later developing the prominent skull and larger brains that typify younger Neanderthal fossils — characteristics lacking in the Sima de los Huesos bones.
“It seems these modifications had to do with an intensive use of the frontal teeth,” Arsuaga said. “The incisors show a great wear, as if they had been used as a third hand — typical of Neanderthals.”
Neanderthals are believed to have co-existed with modern humans that later migrated to Eurasia and likely interbred. But reproductive incompatibility between the two species — paired with the Neanderthal tendency to live in relatively small groups — may have caused them to die out.
Prior to the analysis of the Sima de los Huesos bones, fossils from this period did not shed much light on human evolution during Middle Pleistocene because they are few and far between.
“What makes the Sima de los Huesos site unique is the extraordinary and unprecedented accumulation of hominin fossils there,” Arsuaga said in a news release. “Nothing quite so big has ever been discovered for any extinct hominin species, including Neanderthals.”
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