In stark contrast to the simplistic Bronze Age mythology of the Bible, in which all humanity is supposedly descended from a single magically created couple with no ancestors just a few thousand years ago, followed by a biological reset in a global genocidal flood a mere 4,000 years ago, archaeology continues to reveal a far richer and more complex human story. Instead of a single recent origin, the evidence shows a deep evolutionary history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, involving multiple related human species and regional populations, with occasional interbreeding. Part of that long history was played out in Eurasia.
A study led by scientists from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), just published in Quaternary International, has identified 400,000-year-old human artefacts at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain, together with what may be the earliest evidence of communal hunting. The findings show the sophisticated manufacture of stone tools from locally available chert. The site is also associated with the remains of 60 bison, strongly suggesting a communal butchering site that implies strategic planning, cooperation, and large-scale social coordination.
What makes this especially striking is that these activities took place before the hominin lineage had diversified into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Taken together with other evidence from Atapuerca, including discoveries from Sima de los Huesos (‘Cave of Bones’), the findings indicate that archaic hominins such as Homo antecessor had established themselves in Iberia long before Homo sapiens entered Eurasia.
Who Were Homo antecessor?The research, led by Andoni Arteaga Brieba, a researcher at CENIEH, in collaboration with the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona), is the subject of a news item from CENIEH:Homo antecessor is an extinct early human species known primarily from the Gran Dolina site in the Atapuerca hills of northern Spain. The fossils are generally dated to around 900,000 to 800,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest well-documented human remains in western Europe. Their discovery was important because it showed that human relatives had occupied Europe far earlier than had once been thought. [1]
A Mosaic of Primitive and More Modern Traits
What makes Homo antecessor especially interesting is its mixture of features. Some parts of the anatomy are distinctly archaic, but aspects of the face appear unexpectedly modern and differ from the specialised features seen in later Neanderthals. This combination suggests that early human evolution was not a simple straight-line progression, but a branching process in which different traits appeared at different times in different populations. [2]
Where Does It Fit in the Human Family Tree?
That remains one of the most interesting unanswered questions in palaeoanthropology. Homo antecessor was once proposed as a possible common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, because it lived close to the period before those lineages diverged. More recent palaeoproteomic evidence, however, suggests that it was probably not the direct common ancestor itself, but a close sister group to the lineage that later gave rise to modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. In other words, it seems to represent a population close to a major branching point in human evolution, rather than a confirmed direct ancestor. [2]
Its Relationship to Modern Humans
Current evidence points away from Homo antecessor being part of the direct ancestry of Homo sapiens. A 2026 Nature study on early hominins from Morocco strengthens the case that the lineage leading to modern humans was rooted in Africa, while Homo antecessor appears to have been part of an early Eurasian branch close to, but outside, the later lineage containing modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. [3]
Why It Matters
Homo antecessor helps to show that by nearly a million years ago, human relatives were already established in western Europe and were experimenting with behaviours, technologies, and ways of life that foreshadowed later human success. It also reminds us that human evolution was not the tidy, single-origin tale imagined in creationist mythology, but a long and complicated history of dispersal, isolation, adaptation, and branching lineages. [1]
The Gran Dolina site at Atapuerca reveals an almost exclusive use of local chert 400,000 years ago
The research, led by CENIEH, focuses on level TD10.2 of this Burgos site, where more than 10,000 lithic artefacts have been studied. These were manufactured almost exclusively from local chert and are associated with the remains of more than 60 bison
The Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) leads a paper published in the journal Quaternary International that reveals a distinctive technological behaviour at level TD10.2-BB of Gran Dolina (Atapuerca, Burgos), characterised by the almost exclusive use of local chert and linked to one of the earliest pieces of evidence of communal hunting in the human evolutionary record, dated to around 400,000 years ago. The research, led by Andion Arteaga Brieba, a researcher at CENIEH, in collaboration with IPHES and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona), focuses on this level of the Atapuerca site, where an intensive occupation associated with bison hunting and processing has been documented.Level TD10.2-BB of Gran Dolina represents the earliest evidence of communal hunting in the human evolutionary record. The archaeological assemblage contains the remains of the slaughter and processing of more than 60 bison, documenting an organised hunting activity that required complex strategies and large-scale group coordination.
Andion Arteaga-Brieba, lead author.
Centro Nacional de Investigación Sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH)
Paseo de Atapuerca
Burgos, Spain.
Associated with these faunal remains, the team has analysed more than 10,000 lithic artefacts, identifying a clear preference for the use of local chert, which accounts for almost 99% of the assemblage. This behaviour has no parallels in other Pleistocene sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca, where a greater diversity of raw materials is typically observed.
Planning and complex social organisation
The singularity of this pattern is particularly significant given that the Sierra de Atapuerca offers a rich and diverse lithological environment, with the availability of chert, quartzite, sandstone, and quartz within a radius of less than five kilometres. However, at TD10.2-BB, an almost exclusive selection of chert is observed, which cannot be explained solely in terms of availability or the physical and mechanical properties of the materials.
The authors interpret this behaviour as the result of a shift in raw material procurement areas, from fluvial terraces to the higher zones of the Sierra, directly linked to the dynamics of communal hunting. In this context, the acquisition of lithic resources would have been closely integrated into subsistence activities.
The evidence indicates that human groups transported and produced tools strategically, adapting their technological decisions to the specific needs of hunting and butchering tasks. This pattern reinforces the idea that Middle Pleistocene hominins developed organised behaviours, with capacities for planning, anticipation, and cooperation, particularly in large-scale hunting contexts.
Overall, the study highlights the close relationship between technology, subsistence, and social organisation in human populations 400,000 years ago, contributing to a better understanding of the decision-making processes underlying raw material selection in the archaeological record.
Andion Arteaga-Brieba.
Publication:Arteaga-Brieba, Andion; Mosquera, Marina; Ollé, Andreu
A matter of choice: Raw material specialisation at the Middle Pleistocene kill-butchering site of Gran Dolina TD10.2 (Atapuerca, Spain)
Quaternary International (2026) 765 110221, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2026.110221
What sites such as Gran Dolina show, yet again, is that human history was already ancient, complex, and deeply rooted in evolutionary time long before the authors of Bronze Age mythology began imagining a recent, magical origin for our species. Nearly 400,000 years ago, archaic humans in Iberia were already making deliberate use of local raw materials, organising communal activity, and processing large game in ways that imply planning, cooperation, and accumulated cultural knowledge. None of this looks remotely like a species freshly conjured into existence a few thousand years ago with no past and no relatives.
Instead, it fits perfectly within the evolutionary picture that creationists have spent generations trying to deny: a branching, experimental history in which different human populations emerged, spread, adapted, interacted, and sometimes disappeared, leaving behind fragments of a story that archaeology and palaeoanthropology are steadily piecing together. The inhabitants of Atapuerca were not isolated curiosities; they were part of that long continuum of human evolution that stretches back hundreds of thousands of years before the supposed date of ‘Creation Week’.
And, of course, every new discovery of this kind makes the creationist position more absurd, not less. To preserve their myth, creationists must either ignore this evidence entirely or pretend that sophisticated, tool-making, socially organised hominins were somehow living, hunting, and butchering bison in Europe hundreds of thousands of years before their own timeline allows the Earth itself to have existed. Science, by contrast, has no such difficulty. It simply incorporates the evidence and refines the picture. That is the difference between a model grounded in reality and one grounded in mythology.
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