La Jornada: They discover a cranial fossil of the human race that is more than 200 thousand years old

Madrid. Researchers discovered a skull fragment more than 200,000 years old at the Ruidera site (Ciudad Real), a finding that makes it a promising paleoanthropological site for investigating human evolution during the Middle Pleistocene (between 126,000 and 780,000 years ago).

The fossil, called RVH-1, corresponds to a fragment of parietal bone with archaic characteristics different from the remains dated to the same period.

According to the researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) Daniel García-Martínez, “this discovery provides information about the populations that inhabited the interior of the Iberian Peninsula in that period and places Ruidera in a privileged position on the European map for the study of human evolution during the Middle Pleistocene.”

The discovery, published in the journal Journal of Human Evolution, is a work led by researchers from the UCM and the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in which the National Research Center on Human Evolution (Cenieh), the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social, the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Patricia group from the University of Córdoba and other national and international institutions have participated.

RVH-1 is the first cranial remains from this site and was discovered during the first of the archaeological excavations of the First Settlers of the Alto Guadiana project, which seeks to reconstruct the biological, cultural and environmental history of the human populations that occupied the upper Guadiana basin during the Pleistocene.

Determining the age of the fossil was one of the main challenges of the study. To do this, the team applied, with the scientific collaboration of Cenieh experts, a dating strategy that combined uranium series techniques and optically stimulated luminescence, analyzing both the fossil itself and the sediments in which it appeared. The results indicate that RVH-1 is at least 200 thousand years old, which places it at a decisive moment in European human evolution.

The anatomical analysis shows that the Ruidera parietal presents a combination of features that is unusual among European fossils from this era. Their morphology and thickness are especially interesting because they retain characteristics considered archaic, also called plesiomorphic.

“It is a thick cranial structure, similar to the morphologies associated with other skulls also considered archaic such as that of Ceprano, in Italy, or that of Caune de l’Arago, in the French Pyrenees,” explains García-Martínez.

This singularity shows that at that time there were still populations of hominins in the Iberian Peninsula (the group of primates to which current humans and their closest fossil relatives belong) with unlikely characteristics, retained from ancestral lineages until relatively few hundred thousand years ago.

“This finding supports the idea that human evolution in Europe was not a linear process, but rather a complex scenario in which different populations with different evolutionary histories coexisted,” highlights researcher Carlos Palancar.

The discovery is of special value due to the scarcity of Middle Pleistocene human fossils from the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, a region traditionally underrepresented in the paleoanthropological record. “This finding shows that Ruidera has enormous potential to help us understand who the human populations that inhabited southern Europe were and how they evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago,” explains García-Martínez.

Although the site was located more than a decade ago, systematic excavations began in 2023. To date, animal fossils, abundant stone industry and numerous human remains have been recovered, which could turn Ruidera into a site that changes our way of understanding human evolution in the Iberian Peninsula.

“This fossil is just the tip of the iceberg. Ruidera still has a lot to tell about human evolution in Europe and we are convinced that it will continue to provide findings of great scientific relevance,” concludes Sara Díaz Pérez from the University of Wroclaw (Poland).