The research team at the Atapuerca archaeological sites in Burgos, Spain, has just broken its own record by discovering, for the third time, the oldest human in Western Europe.
The team did so for the first time in 1994, when they unearthed the remains of a new human species, which they named Homo antecessor, at the TD6 level of the Gran Dolina site. These fossils, dated to around 900,000 years ago, challenged the previous notion that the earliest human presence in Western Europe was no older than half a million years.
