BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhuanet) -- Scientist found a small piece of jawbone in a cave in Spain which shows the human ancestor in Europe is up to 1.3 million years old, much earlier than previously believed, media reported Thursday.

    Sientists said that would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.

    "This leads us to a very important, very interesting conclusion," said Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution. It is this: that hominins which emerged from Africa and settled in the Caucasus eventually evolved into Homo antecessor, and that the latter populated Europe not 800,000 years ago, but at least 1.3 million years ago.

    "This discovery of a 1.3 million-year-old fossil shows the process was accelerated and continuous; that the occupation of Europe happened very early and much faster than we had thought," Carbonell said.

    First of all, the newly found jawbone fragment, which has teeth attached to it, preserves a section not seen in the equivalent pieces found at Atapuerca in 1997. So assigning both to the same species must be provisional, said Chris Stringer, a leading researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

    Still, the fact that there are similarities between the two and this along with other archaeological evidence suggests southern Europe did in fact begin to be colonized from western Asia not long after humans emerged from Africa — "something which many of us would have doubted even five years ago," Stringer said.

    Carbonell said that with the finding of human fossils 1.3 million years old in Europe, researchers can now expect to find older ones, even up to 1.8 million years old, in other parts of the continent.

    (Agencies)