Juan Manuel Jiménez Arenas

The upper part of the human pelvis, the ilium, underwent two major structural changes during evolution that enabled humans to walk on two legs. One was the formation of cartilage and the second was the process of bone formation. New research identifies differences in the way bone cells are deposited on cartilage in the human ilium, compared to other primates and human long bones. The study, published in Nature, lays the genetic and evolutionary foundations for bipedalism, according to the authors.

A fragment of a human face discovered in 2022 at the Sima del Elefante site in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos) and dated to between 1.1 and 1.4 million years ago represents the oldest known face in Western Europe. The fossil, nicknamed ‘Pink’, does not belong to Homo antecessor, but has been provisionally catalogued as Homo affinis erectus. The find, which is published in the journal Nature, could indicate that Western Europe was populated by at least two species of hominids during the Early Pleistocene: Homo affinis erectus and, later, Homo antecessor.