New Investigations at the Sima de los Huesos Cave in Atapuerca: Kind of Neandertal and Kind of Not

Science Daily is reporting on a new paper in Science, about the conclusions drawn from the largest single cache of human remains in one place in Europe, the Sima de los Huesos cave, near Atapuerca, in Spain.  They write:

“With the skulls we found," co-author Ignacio Martínez, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Alcalá, added, "it was possible to characterize the cranial morphology of a human population of the European Middle Pleistocene for the first time.”

About 400 to 500 thousand years ago, in the heart of the Pleistocene, archaic humans split off from other groups of that period living in Africa and East Asia, ultimately settling in Eurasia, where they evolved characteristics that would come to define the Neandertal lineage. Several hundred thousand years after that, modern humans -- who had evolved in Africa -- settled in Eurasia, too. They interbred with Neandertals, but even then showed signs of reproductive incompatibility. Because of this, modern humans eventually replaced Neandertals.

This is the hybrid depression that I mentioned a few posts back.  This model fits the genetics information that was summarized by Dennis Venema in his BioLogos post on palaeogenomics from a few weeks ago.  It still also fits with the idea that modern humans swamped a Neandertal genome that was already subject to selective disadvantage.  Consequently, by around 27-29 ky BP, the last populations of Neandertals are, perhaps represented by Zafarraya, a late surviving Neandertal from the very southern coast of Spain. The idea that this Neandertal represents a refugium has been kicked around for decades. Critically, the earliest moderns in Central Europe predate this “last neandertal” by between five and nine thousand years and the evidence from Lagar Velho, in Portugal, indicates that hybridization was occurring as late as this. 

How a Headline Can Get Away From You

IO9 has a story on the 12 mya primate find from Spain with the unfortunate headline:
"12 Million Year Old Hominid With Human Features Discovered In Spain."

No it doesn't. The features aren't remotely human. They are ape-like; and Miocene ape-like, at that! The rest of the article is fairly stock, with the exception of this set of paragraphs:

It's the specimen's facial morphology that has really attracted interest. While most of the primates in the Hominidae family are prognathic, or marked by a protruding jaw, Anoiapithecus brevirostris has a remarkably flat face. Its facial features are comparable only to the Homo genus, of which we're the only living representative and which didn't even exist for nearly ten million years after Anoiapithecus brevirostris.

That's not to say Lluc is some sort of time-displaced missing link between modern humans and ancient apes. Instead, the researchers speculate this may be an example of evolutionary convergence, where similar environmental conditions produce similar adaptations. If nothing else, this discovery may help researchers better understand the occurrence of reduced prognathism in certain strands of the Hominidae family.

Well, YAH! That's probably what's going on.We simply don't have enough information to develop any well-established hypotheses about what this thing represents, yet. Give it time. But, for crying out loud, don't go around calling it an ape with "human features." That's just irresponsible. I can't wait for the YEC groups to weigh in on this one.