The first hominin of Europe

One of the most debated topics in stone-age archaeology is the date of the earliest human occupation of Europe. This has been frustratingly hard to establish, because the ages of the oldest-known occupation sites are hard to pin down with precision, and the sites contain stone tools rather than human remains. Now there is something more solid to go on, with the discovery of a human lower jaw associated with stone tools and animal bones from the Sima del Elefante cave deposit at the famous complex of fossil-human-bearing sites at Atapuerca in northern Spain. The finds have been dated to between 1.1 and 1.2 million years old using a variety of dating techniques. Of course it's impossible to know if these hominins were the first Europeans, but this site is certainly the oldest and most accurately dated record of human occupation in western Europe. The cover shows the key find, mandible fragment ATE9-1, now in the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, in Burgos.