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Juan Luis Arsuaga, co-director of the excavations, announced on Tuesday that the discovery was made in the 'Sima de los Huesos, - 'The Pit of the Bones' and that the skull is that of a hominid female, probably in her teens. It's the sixteenth such find at the site, and is believed to be more than 500,000 years old. Another of the three Atapuerca co-directors, Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, has meanwhile said that a study of two fossilised human teeth also discovered at the dig will likely be published in an international scientific journal early next year. One of...

Scientists in Spain say that they have found a tooth from a distant human ancestor that is more than one million years old. The tooth, a pre-molar, was discovered on Wednesday at the Atapuerca site in northern Spain's Burgos Province. It represented western Europe's "oldest human fossil remain", a statement from the Atapuerca Foundation said. The foundation said it was awaiting final results before publishing its findings in a scientific journal. Human story Several caves containing evidence of prehistoric human occupation have been found in Atapuerca. In 1994 fossilised remains called Homo antecessor (Pioneer Man) - believed to date back...

An archaeologist holds a mandible bone attributed to Homo antecessor, dating from about 800,000 years ago, during a presentation of the latest discoveries and cataloguing at the site of the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain June 20, 2005. This mandible, which shows a primitive structural pattern shared with all African and Asian Homo species, adds to the hominin sample recovered from this site between 1994 and 1996. It is the left half of a gracile mandible belonging probably to a female adult with premolars and molars in place.

Disaster may have killed ancients By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff Homo heidelbergensis appears about 600,000 years ago The remains of 28 early humans found buried at the bottom of a cave shaft in northern Spain may belong to a group that died suddenly in a "catastrophe". Experts conducted an analysis to determine whether it was likely the bodies accumulated in the shaft over years or were dumped at the same time. They concluded the 350,000-year-old death chamber may have held the victims of a disease outbreak or a massacre. The study details are published in the Journal...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Comfortable, coddled 21st century humans, meet Ice Age Neanderthal. The first complete skeleton of a Neanderthal, the prehistoric people who became extinct about 30,000 years ago, graces an American Museum of Natural History exhibition in New York on the mysteries of human origins. It features fossils and artifacts up to a million years old dug up in caves at two sites in northern Spain. "This really blew me away, I have to say," said Ian Tattersall, co-curator of "The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca" exhibition which opened last week and runs through April...

In a laboratory in the upper recesses of the American Museum of Natural History, away from the public galleries, Dr. Ian Tattersall, a tall Homo sapiens, stooped and came face to face with a Neanderthal man, short and robust but bearing a family resemblance — until one looked especially closely. A paleoanthropologist who has studied and written about Neanderthals, Dr. Tattersall was getting his first look at a virtually complete skeleton from this famously extinct branch of the hominid family. Nothing quite like it has ever been assembled before, the foot bones connected to the ankle bones and everything else...

On the Ecological Connection Between Sabre-tooths and Hominids: Faunal Dispersal Events in the Lower Pleistocene and a Review of the Evidence for the First Human Arrival in Europe  Alfonso ArribasMuseo Geominero, Instituto Tecnológico Geominero de España. Ríos Rosas, 23. 28003 Madrid, Spain.Paul PalmqvistDepartamento de Geología y Ecología (Área de Paleontología), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Málaga. 29071 Málaga, Spain. A reconstruction of a community of the large mammals of the Grecian Pleistocene .African Species in the Lower Pleistocene of Europe …The sabre-tooth genus Megantereon shares much in common with Smilodon, and both genera form the tribe Smilodontini. The earliest...

DNA samples were obtained from eight early Iberian farmers whose remains were discovered in Spain’s El Portalón cave in Atapuerca. Like populations in central and northern Europe, the Iberian farmers had traveled from the south and mixed with local hunter-gatherer groups. “The genetic variation observed in modern-day Basques is significantly closer to the newly sequenced early farmers than to older Iberian hunter-gatherer samples,” “Parts of that early farmer population probably remained relatively isolated since then (which we can still see in the distinct culture and language of Basques)

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...

Research into 430,000-year-old fossils... A large international research team including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam studied the body size and shape in the human fossil collection from the site of the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. Dated to around 430,000 years ago, this site preserves the largest collection of human fossils found to date anywhere in the world. The researchers found that the Atapuerca individuals were relatively tall, with wide, muscular bodies and less brain mass relative to body mass compared to Neanderthals. The Atapuerca humans shared many anatomical features with the later...

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...

Britain's leading expert on human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, has warned in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology that the team in charge of La Sima has got the ages of its fossils wrong by 200,000 years and has incorrectly identified the species of ancient humans found there. Far from being a 600,000-year-old lair of a species called Homo heidelbergensis, he believes the pit is filled with Neanderthal remains that are no more than 400,000 years old. The difference in interpretation has crucial implications for understanding human evolution... La Sima de los Huesos was discovered by potholers...

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,...

Atapuerca gives us incontrovertible evidence that there was human life, already in north Spain, in 1.2m years BC. Is it possible that the "out of Africa" theory is wrong - that mankind evolved separately in Europe? ...Atapuerca's rich limestone silt hides still another secret, even more astonishing. As archaeologist Susana Callizo explains... "The question you have to ask is, how did those skeletons get down there? The Pit of Bones is inaccessible. Even today it is difficult to approach - the archaeologists have to abseil down a narrow chasm, then crawl through passages, before they can start digging. Some people...