Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered
49 comments
·March 23, 2025echelon
ghostly_s
Oh, facial bones. Now Im less confused. I think the layman would call that a skull fragment.
dzdt
Agreed. I was the same place: do they mean an imprint of a face? Or a partially preserved ancient artwork? No, they mean fossilised bone fragments comprising upper mouth and cheekbone areas of a human skull.
BrenBarn
Yeah I was confused as well. "Face" isn't really a body part, it's more of a perceptual unit. It's just a piece of the front of someone's head.
mac3n
now, run that through an AI face de-ager!
llm_nerd
Didn't humans first leave Africa 100,000 years ago by high estimates? To Western Europe 40,000 years ago?
Doesn't this completely upend early humanity?
diddlybopshubop
Modern humans did. Other human species left Africa and populated the rest of the old world much, much earlier.
I'm not up-to-date on my research these days but it's only within the last 10K years or so (maybe even more recent) where there's been one extant human subspecies.
kbrannigan
What if the literature of God Created men(mankind) in his image came to differentiate Homo sapiens from others.
Or the history really began once the other Humans were no more ?
Just passing thoughts
cdblades
There are at least several thousand years between the last non-modern human hominids dying out and the first writing emerging.
IAmBroom
I've been thinking about this a lot, by coincidence, as I read Unsong by Scott Alexander (unsongbook.com). It's a beautifully written somewhat comic and somewhat tragic story about the kabbalic-turned-capitalist search for the powerful Names of God.
It occurred to me that, if the Abrahamic God exists, and the origin of Adam is anything more than a mere metaphor, God must have had to make a decision at some point. "There!", He/She/It said as the last vital chromosome fell into place in generation Aleph-1, "All this work is finally done. Whew! I could use some rest." Or something.
But maybe it's all metaphor (except for the God existing part). Maybe the Garden of Eden was Us (big-us, all the hominids) co-existing without technology, and the rise of flint-knapping/agriculture/representational art/whatever was the "eating of the fruit and gaining of knowledge".
Or any other variation you like, as long as you're not intentionally bound from thinking by a literalist view of the Torah's Book of Genesis. In which case, I have bad news: "Adam" wasn't even named that in the early writings, presumably closer to God's word. So, your translation is a bad start for you.
So, maybe the "Twelve Tribes of Israel" are themselves metaphoric for the whole set of hominin branches. Maybe "Ham" was Paranthropus. Accepting that "seven" in the bible sometimes implies "an important big number", maybe "seven" generations later (give or take a few 100) Paranthropus died out completely. Poor Ham. He was just checking to make sure Dad didn't oversleep.
Or maybe, there is no God, and it's just fun to play with myths, which are culturally powerful.
kingofthehill98
The craziest thing for me is that there's a lot of evidence for claiming that Sapiens interbred with other Homos, such as the Neanderthal.
wincy
If you’ve seen Star Trek the Original Series it shows you precisely how much humans are into humanoid subspecies. They could be green for all a dude who hasn’t seen a woman in a week could care!
danielbln
Why is that crazy? Looking at human history, this doesn't come as much of a shock, does it?
gigachad69
a lot of evidence as in most europeans, eurasians and east asians have some percentage of neanderthal genes in their DNA
dyauspitr
Interbred is putting it mildly. More like killed the men and raped all the women. This was repeated again with the Yamnaya from the Caucasus a few millennia ago where they again killed all the men and raped all the women.
encipriano
Isnt neanderthal sapiens. Also, not all modern humans
thaumasiotes
> Other human species left Africa and populated the rest of the old world much, much earlier.
Usually those would be called hominids, not humans.
sightbroke
Article says this skull fragment is possibly Homo Erectus.
This says they left Africa within in that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
This has further details on human evolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution
This covers in more detail the time modern humans migrated from Africa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...
ge96
> Ah-ha! But no one has found the missing link between ape and this so called Homo habilis
IAmBroom
Using the term "missing link" instantly flags you as not having a serious evolutionary background.
We don't find "missing links". Ever, really. They existed, but the fossil record is far too small a sampling to gift us like that.
ceejayoz
No. Human here means a species in the Homo genus. That includes a lot more than just modern humans.
eesmith
Homo but not Homo sapiens.
> “The evidence is still insufficient for a definitive classification, which is why it has been assigned to H. aff. erectus. This designation acknowledges Pink’s affinities with Homo erectus while leaving open the possibility that it may belong to another species.” - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...
codingwagie
You dont still believe that do you?
dyauspitr
No the homo genus includes everything from something barely distinguishable from an gorilla all the way to modern humans.
dkarl
All homo species are or were bipedal tool users and descended from ancestors that had been bipedal tool users for a million years prior. You wouldn't get them confused with a gorilla.
dyauspitr
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/files/2016/10/Homo-habilis-r...
Homo habilis looks like a slight shorter haired gorilla.
IAmBroom
Only if you can't tell a gorilla from a chimpanzee.
Neither are first-cousins to Homo, which is descended from genii since the split from the shoot that Bonobos came from.
eesmith
More info in the press release from UCL at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...
docmechanic
'The discovery of a human facial fragment aged over one million years represents the oldest known face in western Europe and confirms the region was inhabited by two species of human during the early Pleistocene, finds a new study.'
erellsworth
They don't look a day over 900,000 years.
mjd
Insert Joan Rivers joke here
Institutional source with photos:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...
Paper with many photos and figures:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08681-0