400,000-Year Old Cranium Found in Portugal

A multinational research team has discovered a fossil human at the site of Aroeira, in Portugal.  From the story in EurekAlert:

The cranium represents the westernmost human fossil ever found in Europe during the middle Pleistocene epoch and one of the earliest on this continent to be associated with the Acheulean stone tool industry. In contrast to other fossils from this same time period, many of which are poorly dated or lack a clear archaeological context, the cranium discovered in the cave of Aroeira in Portugal is well-dated to 400,000 years ago and appeared in association with abundant faunal remains and stone tools, including numerous bifaces (handaxes).

The skull is considerably encrusted, still and much work will have to be done. It is long and low, with large brow ridges, a sloping forehead and a large occipital protuberance. It does not look like it has an angular torus, however. All of these characteristics are consistent with this date. Neat!

Here is the image from the short post.

European Hand Axes Almost a Million Years Old

New dating has revealed that hand axes from two sites in Spain are close to a million years old. Yahoo UK reports:

Gary Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in Berkeley, California applied a technique called magnetostratigraphy to determine that the hatchets were in fact crafted between 760,000 and 900,000 years ago.

Magnetostratigraphy is based on the periodic reversal of Earth's magnetic field.

Acting like tiny compasses, fine-grained magnetic minerals in the tools contain a record of the polarity at the time they were used. Once buried in sediment, the polarity is preserved.

"The age (of the axes) must be Early Pleistocene, the most recent period dominated by reverse polarity, 1.78-to-0.78 million years ago," the researchers concluded.

Magnetostratigraphy is also known as palaeomagnetism. It was always suspected that the hand axe use was there, it is just that there has been no concrete evidence. This changes that. There is a tool assemblage called the "Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition," that is practiced by Neandertals in southern Europe and Gibraltar but it is more advanced than the typical hand axes you find associated with Homo erectus. The transition likely took place much after this, in southern Europe.