A collection of ancient human fossils has been recovered and it is believed that they provide evidence that early humans, Neanderthals, developed their teeth before their brains, in order to use them as a third hand to hold objects. The process of evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years and the skulls are thought to be 400,000 years old.
The discovery was made at the Sima de los Huesos in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains; the skulls will help scientists to understand the evolution of man during the Middle Pleistocene period. Lead researcher Juan-Luis Arsuaga described this as ‘a long period, of about half a million years, during which hominin evolution didn’t proceed through a slow process of change with just one kind of hominin quietly evolving towards the classic Neanderthal.’ Referring to the site of the discovery, Arsuaga said ‘What makes the Sima de los Huesos site unique is the extraordinary and unprecedented accumulation of hominin fossils there; nothing quite so big has ever been discovered for any extinct hominin species – including Neanderthals.’
Co-author of the study, Ignacio Martinez, added; ‘With the skulls we found it was possible to characterise the cranial morphology of a human population of the European Middle Pleistocene for the first time.’