Researchers have long assumed that a jaw fragment found in Europe could have come from a Neanderthal, but the new analyzes have taken a different tack.
THE Jaw It does not resemble that of a Neanderthal and could belong to Homo sapiens, who lived 45,000 to 66,000 years ago and is now believed to be the oldest piece of the human species on the European continent.
The piece was found in Spain in 1887 in the town of Banyoles, from which the fragment’s name derives. Scholars have studied the piece extensively since then, dating it to a time in the Pleistocene, a region of Europe where Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were dominant.
First, the shape of the bones suggested to the scientists that the Banyoles jaw was Neanderthal: “The jaw has been studied in the last century and has long been thought of because of its age and location, as well as the fact that it lacks one of the properties of diagnosis of Homo sapiens: a chin,” said University of the USA paleoanthropologist Brian Keeling.
Brian Keeling, along with his colleagues, thoroughly investigated the structure through a threedimensional geometricmorphometric analysis. The procedure is noninvasive and intensively examines the entire bone formation, from a map of the most specific features to comparison with other fragments found.
Photo: Green, J. Hum. Development, 2006.
The fragment was used as a highresolution 3D scan to examine the mandible that was found and to reconstruct the missing parts. After that, the jaw was compared to that of Neanderthals and modern humans.
“Our results found something quite surprising,” he pointed out, concluding the analysis: Banyoles did not share distinctive Neanderthal features and did not overlap with Neanderthals in their general shape.”
The chin was the main part to arrive at this conclusion since the main feature of Homo sapiens compared to other archaic humans concerned the missing chin. Banyoles have no Neanderthal traits, and the researchers concluded that the odd shape could be due to them belonging to a hybrid individual.
Two possibilities are presented: Banyoles was a hybrid individual among Homo sapiens from an unknown group of humans that has not yet been identified, or it was a Homo sapiens from a group of unknown individuals coexisting with Neanderthals at the end of Pleistocene Europe.
“If Banyoles is indeed a member of our species, this prehistoric human would be the first Homo sapiens ever documented in Europe,” says Keeling.