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About 800,000 years ago in what is now Spain, cannibals devoured an early human child who became known as "The Boy of Gran Dolina." But new analysis of these ancient remains has revealed a surprising twist: the child was a girl.The child was a Homo antecessor, an early hominin species that lived in Europe between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago. Discovered in 1994 in the Gran Dolina cave in northern Spain's Atapuerca Mountains, the species is known primarily from fragments of bones and teeth, which hampered researchers' efforts to determine the sex of H. antecessor individuals.Recently, scientists... examined teeth...

Credit: Mathieu Duval ========================================================================= First direct dating of an early human tooth confirms the antiquity of Homo antecessor, western Europe's oldest known human fossil species. A previous find from the unit TD6 of Atapuerca Gran Dolina archaeological site in northern Spain has yielded more information about our early human lineage. An international team of researchers from Australia, China, France and Spain has conducted the first direct dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antecessor (H. antecessor), the earliest known hominin species identified in Europe. The study shows that H. antecessor probably lived somewhere between 772 000 and 949...

Archaeologists in Spain are busy excavating the Gran Dolonia portion of the Atapuerca archaeological site for clues to the first humans that arrived in Europe. Many archaeological treasures have come from this northern Spain location known as the caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca. In 2007 human remains were found that date back one and a half million years, considered the oldest Europeans remains ever found. Human remains have also been found from the "Homo antecessor" dating back 850,000-to-950,000-years ago. The youngest remains found here date back a mere 5,000-years ago from the homo sapien species. The site is in...

The earliest known instance of cannibalism among hominids occurred roughly 800,000 years ago. The victims, mainly children, may have been eaten as part of a strategy to defend territories against neighbors, researchers report online in the Journal of Human Evolution. The new study shows how anthropologists use the behavior of modern humans and primates to make inferences about what hominids did in the past -- and demonstrates the limitations of such comparisons. The cannibalism in question was discovered in the Gran Dolina cave site of Spain's Atapuerca Mountains. Eudald Carbonell of the University of Rovira and Virgili in Spain and...

Scientists said Monday they had uncovered evidence suggesting cave dwellers who lived in northern Spain some 500,000 years ago took care of their elderly and infirm. University of Madrid palaeontologists discovered the partial skeleton of a male of a European species ancestral to the Neanderthals who suffered from a stoop and possibly needed a stick to remain upright, they said in a statement. "This individual would be probably impaired for hunting, among other activities. His survival during a considerable period with these impairments allows us to hypothesize that the nomadic group of which this individual was part would provide special...

It is the second complete cranium to be found at the site A 500,000 year old complete cranium has been recovered from the Atapuerca side at Sima de los Huesos de Atapuerca in Burgos. It's the second complete cranium to be found at the site which shows the presence of Homo Antecessor in the region. Sources at the Atapuerca Foundation say that once the practical entire cranium has been recovered the meticulous reconstruction of the bones will be undertaken during the winter. The first cranium to be found at the site, known as Craneo 5 is now on display...

A study of the remains revealed that they turned to cannibalism to feed themselves and not as part of a ritual, that they ate their rivals after killing them, mostly children and adolescents. "It is the first well-documented case of cannibalism in the history of humanity, which does not mean that it is the oldest," he said. The remains discovered in the caves "appeared scattered, broken, fragmented, mixed with other animals such as horses, deer, rhinoceroses, all kinds of animals caught in hunting" and eaten by humans, he said. "This gives us an idea of cannibalism as a type gastronomy,...