A look at the Sima del Elefante face

When the global timeline passed one million years ago, more than half the span of hominin presence in Eurasia had already passed by. The earliest archaeological evidence in Eurasia is more than two million years old—found in places like Shangchen, China, and the Dawqara Formation of Jordan. Just this year Grăunceanu, Romania, joined the list of early archaeological traces of hominins in Europe, dating to an estimated 1.97 million years ago.

Still, I think about the threshold of one million years ago quite often. The number of sites in Eurasia with hominin evidence before one million years ago has grown quite large. It would have been hard to imagine this in 1990, when many scientists wondered if any sites in Eurasia were really older than this. Today there are many. And yet, the number of sites with fossils of hominins is quite a lot smaller than the number with stone artifacts or cutmarked animal bones. Most are in China or Indonesia, in addition to the exceptional site of Dmanisi, Georgia.

In western Europe there may be only two such sites, both in Spain: Sima del Elefante and Barranco Léon.

This week Rosa Huguet and collaborators have reported on a significant new addition to this very humble record. In work at Sima del Elefante in 2022, excavators uncovered a fragmentary facial skeleton, designated as ATE7-1. The estimated age of this fossil face is between 1.4 million and 1.1 million years ago.

The new fossil joins two other hominin fossils from this cave deposit, within the same range of ages, a finger bone and a fragment of the front portion of a mandible with several worn teeth, ATE9-1. These fossils have been previously published, the mandible in 2008.

None of these fossils provide much to go on. Huguet and coworkers compared the facial anatomy of ATE7-1 with fossil faces attributed to Homo erectus from Dmanisi, Georgia, and Sangiran, Indonesia. They also compared the face to fossils from Gran Dolina, Spain, attributed to Homo antecessor. This site is located only a few hundred meters from Sima del Elefante but represents hominins and stone artifacts from around 780,000 years ago—as much as a half million years or more later than Sima del Elefante.

The ATE7-1 face is more like most H. erectus faces than either is like the later Gran Dolina fossils. When José María Bermúdez de Castro and collaborators defined Homo antecessor in 1997, they noted several aspects of the face that distinguish that species from many earlier fossils of Homo erectus. The ATD6-69 partial face from Gran Dolina was the most important single specimen in defining that species. Below its orbit, the face is short, the thin plate of bone just below the eye sloped backward, the lower border bearing a small knobby lump just where the zygomatic bone meets the maxillary. That form is more like many of today's humans than most H. erectus fossils, although the famous Zhoukoudian facial anatomy shares this aspect. The Sima del Elefante face does not share this pattern of facial anatomy with the later Gran Dolina fossils.

Mainly for this reason, Huguet and coworkers suggest that the Sima del Elefante face may be H. erectus. They leave an opening for themselves by not fully committing to this diagnosis—using Homo aff. erectus—and there's nothing wrong with that. The evidence so far is really not very much to be confident about how these fossils connect, aside from the broad similarity with fossils much further to the east, both earlier and later in time.

The work at Sima del Elefante over some twenty years has shown some of the earliest evidence of behavior of human relatives in Europe, now back to as early as 1.4 million years. They were eating meat, using their stone tools to cut and process carcasses, as both earlier and later hominins did. 

They were also eating plants and taking care of their teeth as best as they could. In 2017 Karen Hardy and collaborators analyzed dental calculus from the ATE9-1 mandibular teeth. One of the calculus samples was taken adjacent to an groove at the base of one of the tooth crowns. This kind of groove is formed when individuals use small wood implements or grass stems to probe between their teeth. Hardy and coworkers found that the calculus sample contained wood fibers. These are the earliest evidence of the kinds of probes that were used for tooth care. The calculus also contained starch granules from plants, including some from a grass which may have come from seed consumption.

It's not surprising that these groups, so far-flung and sparse on their landscapes, do not show any especially close connection to the later Gran Dolina hominins around the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene. The Gran Dolina individuals and other European hominins at or near their age may descend in part from earlier, more erectus-like Europeans including Sima del Elefante. Or the later groups may have come from elsewhere at any time during the almost half-million years separating them. A half million years is a very long time.

What the behavioral information shows is that the way that these hominins interacted with their ecologies had a lot of continuity across space and time. To me that very stability of the early hunting and gathering mode of life is the most important insight about how these hominins successfully inhabited large parts of Eurasia for so long.

References

Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Arsuaga, J. L., Carbonell, E., Rosas, A., Martı́nez, I., & Mosquera, M. (1997). A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans. Science, 276(5317), 1392–1395. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.276.5317.1392

Carbonell, E., Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Parés, J. M., Pérez-González, A., Cuenca-Bescós, G., Ollé, A., Mosquera, M., Huguet, R., van der Made, J., Rosas, A., Sala, R., Vallverdú, J., García, N., Granger, D. E., Martinón-Torres, M., Rodríguez, X. P., Stock, G. M., Vergès, J. M., Allué, E., … Arsuaga, J. L. (2008). The first hominin of Europe. Nature, 452(7186), 465–469. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06815

Curran, S. C., Drăgușin, V., Pobiner, B., Pante, M., Hellstrom, J., Woodhead, J., Croitor, R., Doboș, A., Gogol, S. E., Ersek, V., Keevil, T. L., Petculescu, A., Popescu, A., Robinson, C., Werdelin, L., & Terhune, C. E. (2025). Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago. Nature Communications, 16(1), 836. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9

Hardy, K., Radini, A., Buckley, S., Blasco, R., Copeland, L., Burjachs, F., Girbal, J., Yll, R., Carbonell, E., & Bermúdez de Castro, J. M. (2016). Diet and environment 1.2 million years ago revealed through analysis of dental calculus from Europe’s oldest hominin at Sima del Elefante, Spain. The Science of Nature, 104(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-016-1420-x

Lorenzo, C., Pablos, A., Carretero, J. M., Huguet, R., Valverdú, J., Martinón-Torres, M., Arsuaga, J. L., Carbonell, E., & Bermúdez de Castro, J. M. (2015). Early Pleistocene human hand phalanx from the Sima del Elefante (TE) cave site in Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain). Journal of Human Evolution, 78, 114–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.08.007