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“We regard its age as quite likely between 865,000 and 810,000 years ago,” said Michael Walker of Spain’s Murcia University, a lead researcher on Cueva Negra. “[Arguably] Until now hand-axes in Europe have not been recorded from before 500,000 years ago,” said Walker. Moreover, he adds, “the evidence of combustion [use of fire] is also the oldest anywhere outside Africa.” The new dating results were acquired through biochronological analysis of small-mammal teeth remains found within the Cueva Negra rockshelter, indicating they accumulated during what is technically called the Matuyama magnetochron, or between 0.99 and 0.78 Ma. Researchers do not yet know...

Most recent dating places one wave of human dispersal out of Africa into southeastern Spain at almost one million years ago. Using state-of-the-art dating methodologies, a team of scientists have obtained or confirmed a date range between .9 and .85 Mya (million years ago) as a time when a species of Old World monkey (Theropithecus) and an early species of human occupied the cave site of Cueva Victoria in southeastern Spain. It is a location not far from where many scientists have hypothesized that humans may have crossed over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at...

"We know now that the sediments in the cave were laid down long, long before the last ice age, and that it's Paleolithic "Levalloisian" chert flakes, some of which have edges modified by "Mousterian" retouch are among the oldest of this kind not only in Europe but even in Africa, and are accompanied by an "Acheulian" hand-axe on a stone cobble," reports Michael Walker. "The entire 5-meter deep block of sediment in the cave belongs to the end of the early Early Pleistocene ( 2,588,000-781,000years ago) according to new optical sediment luminescence dating carried out at Oxford University in 2007...