It has been 900,000 years since human beings inhabited the territory that Spain now occupies . Homo antecessor is, so far, the oldest species we have identified. But, despite the privileged information that we obtain from deposits such as Atapuerca , it is not clear how we got here.
get out of the nest
Humans who populated North Africa 2.5 million years ago looked out over the Mediterranean Sea and gazed longingly at the mountains rising across the water. The Iberian Peninsula was an unknown territory for them, with resources to be exploited and where they could go with their stone tools to hunt and savor the animals that roamed there.
From our current perspective it may seem that those humans had a stumbling block that, with a little effort, they could have easily overcome. The Strait of Gibraltar separates Africa from Europe by only 15 kilometers, but the first effective rafts were not manufactured until the end of prehistory. The departure from Africa did not occur until a million years later (chronology always subject to change by new discoveries), and the paths taken by humans are the subject of debate . Humans could reach North Africa by following the coast, always a reliable source of resources, or by crossing the Sahara, then a less inhospitable area where the color green would soon lose the battle against the sand dunes. But the phenomenon known as Out of Africa , the departure of the Homo genus from the cradle of humanity, still has many mysteries to solve. To help fit the pieces together, we have a key deposit in Spain: Atapuerca , in Burgos.
The route that the deposits seem to show points to East Africa. Humans emerged 1.8 million years ago and it seems logical that the bridge between Africa and Asia that is the Near East was the place where the colonization of the rest of the world began. Through there they would reach Central Asia and the Far East and, later, they populated Europe to its western end . At least it is the hypothesis defended by a current trend that, supported by genetic studies, explains that humans arrived in Iberia from the Near East , moving to the sound of climate change.
Life a million years ago
Regardless of the route we take (we must not think of a single arrival channel), between 1.4 million years and 800,000 years ago, humans already lived in the territory that the Greeks would end up calling Iberia . The lower levels of Sima del Elefante and Gran Dolina , in Atapuerca, give us an idea of what life was like in the Iberian Peninsula at that time . Although it would have a more humid climate, the Mediterranean ecosystem and the main characteristics of its environment would be totally familiar to us today’s humans.
The fossils found do show us species that are very different from the current fauna : hippopotamuses, elephants, beavers and otters inhabited the banks of the rivers that crossed forests with wild boars, bison, giant deer, horses and rhinoceroses. Hyenas, wolves, saber-toothed wolves, and European jaguars were, along with humans, the area’s top predators . What humans lived with these animals?
The profile of our “ancestors”
One of the oldest remains in Western Europe is a 1.4-million-year-old baby tooth that appeared in Barranco de León (Granada). Hardly any conclusions can be drawn from such a meager find. Luckily we have Gran Dolina , in Atapuerca, a whole prehistoric diary. We have more than 170 fossil remains of Homo antecessor , so far the first human species to inhabit Iberia that we can reconstruct from the finds .
These early Europeans had a face much closer to our own than to that of the apes . Let’s just say it was the oldest modern face. They did have their foreheads tilted back and the tops of their eye sockets more pronounced than ours. With a height, weight and average proportions equal to our current ones, Antecessor was a restless species like any hunter and gatherer in search of resources, who moved through the territory to the beat of the seasons.
The journey of the colonization of the environment by humans continues its course. There were those who looked at the Moon with the same yearning that today we look at other planets and stars. A dreamy look, with the desire to explore unknown territories, like the humans who looked out over the Mediterranean more than two million years ago.
References:
Bermúdez de Castro, JM 2012. Explorers. The history of the Atapuerca site . Debate.Blain, H. et al. 2013. Early Pleistocene palaeoenvironments at the time of the Homo antecessor settlement in the Gran Dolina cave (Atapuerca, Spain) . Journal of Quaternary Science 28, 3, 311-319. DOI: 10.1002/jqs.2622.
