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. The discovery of a human lower jaw associated with stone tools and animal bones from the Sima del Elefante in northern Spain is reported. The finds have been dated to between 1.1 and 1.2 million years using a variety of dating techniques, making the site the oldest and most accurately dated record of human occupation in Europe. The earliest hominin occupation of Europe is one of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology. However, the purportedly oldest of the Early Pleistocene sites in Eurasia lack precise age control and contain stone tools rather than human fossil remains1,2,3,4,5. Here we report the discovery of a human mandible associated with an assemblage of Mode 1 lithic tools and faunal remains bearing traces of hominin processing, in stratigraphic level TE9 at the site of the Sima del Elefante, Atapuerca, Spain6,7,8. Level TE9 has been dated to the Early Pleistocene (approximately 1.2–1.1 Myr), based on a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and biostratigraphy. The Sima del Elefante site thus emerges as the oldest, most accurately dated record of human occupation in Europe, to our knowledge. The study of the human mandible suggests that the first settlement of Western Europe could be related to an early demographic expansion out of Africa. The new evidence, with previous findings in other Atapuerca sites (level TD6 from Gran Dolina9,10,11,12,13), also suggests that a speciation event occurred in this extreme area of the Eurasian continent during the Early Pleistocene, initiating the hominin lineage represented by the TE9 and TD6 hominins.
