Fossils found in northern Spain show that the earliest humans to live in Europe date back to as much as 1.2 million years ago, about 400,000 years earlier than previously thought. A piece of human jawbone and teeth found in a cave at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, was accurately dated to 4-500,000 years earlier than remains found in 1997.

"It is the oldest human fossil yet found in Western Europe," said co-author Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, director of Spain's National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, quoted by BBC News.

The humanoids are probably Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, which is thought to be a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens). The discovery is detailed in the current issue of the journal Nature by a team of Spanish and American scientists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution at Tarragona, Spain.

Evidence of various human activities in Europe was previously found dating back to around 1 million years ago, but no fossils were found to undoubtedly certify human presence. The new findings reinforce the theory that early humans spread from Africa via the Middle East, not directly from Africa across the Gibraltar strait as it was most widely believed.

This is also supported by similarities with fossils found in the central Asian country of Georgia which are even older, dating back to more than 1.5 million years ago.

"This discovery of a 1.3 million-year-old fossil shows the process was accelerated and continuous; that the occupation of Europe happened very early and much faster than we had thought," Carbonell said to AP.

Image credit: EIA/Jordi Mestre