June 30, 2022, at the Elephant Pit site in Atapuerca (Burgos), the fossil of the left side of the face of a hominid that lived between 1.1 and 1.4 million years ago was found. More than two years later, researchers from the Atapuerca Research Project have been able to partially reconstruct the face of this adult individual, whom they have named Pink, a tribute by anthropologists Eudald Carbonell and José María Bermúdez de Castro to the musical group Pink Floyd. "When we unearthed it, we thought it would be a Homo antecessor But that wasn't the case; it belongs to an earlier species. The discovery changes the story we had about prehistory," says Rosa Huguet, the researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-BÚSQUEDA) who led the study published in Nature. Pink would be the oldest hominid located so far in Western Europe.

The first fossils ofHomo erectus were discovered on the island of Java in the late 19th century. Since then, more have appeared in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. And the more we know, the more similarities are found between this robust, lung-capacity species and modern hominids. The latest research confirms thatHomo erectus, which inhabited the Earth between two million years ago and the end of the Pleistocene, was more intelligent and much more adept at adapting and surviving in different environments and in a changing world than previously thought.