New research has shown that a skeleton of an 800,000-year-old ancestral species for modern humans belonged to a female and not a male.
The gender change in the skeleton, formerly known as the Gran Dolina boy, came after researchers used modern techniques to analyze dental tissue and found it belonged to a girl between the ages of nine and eleven.
The skeleton is an example of Homo antecessor, which is believed to be the final common ancestor shared by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals before the separation of the two species.
The remains were found at the Spanish archaeological site Grand Dolina in the 1960s, and were later determined to have died after being killed and eaten by a rival tribe.
Scientists had no idea what the real gender was until this study, with the concept of being a boy coming from a children’s book about the site written by José Maria Bermúdez de Castro in 2002 called El Chico De La Gran Dolina .
“At the time it was not known what sex this fossil belonged to, so a male name was chosen, but it could have been a female name,” said study author Cecilla Garcia.
New research has shown that a skeleton of an 800,000-year-old ancestral species for modern humans belonged to a female and not a male. Artist print
The new study, conducted by Garcia and colleagues from the Dental Anthropology Group of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH), is the first to calculate the sex of two of the most complete fossils found at the site.
Using modern techniques, they examined the remains of the individual H1, from which the species Homo antecessor was defined, and the individual H3, which was previously assumed to be a girl due to the children’s book of the place of excavation.
The results revealed that the canines of the two individuals show differences comparable to those observed between modern men and women.
“This has established that H1 was probably a male, while the H3 fossil was probably a female,” Carcia explained.
Many researchers have analyzed the human remains found in Gran Dolina, although so far it has not been possible to assess gender differences.
This is because most individuals were immature, meaning they had not reached adolescence, which complicates the estimation of their sex.
In addition, there is the difficulty of having only small skeletal fragments available, rather than a complete set of bones, they added.
“Until now, we only knew the sex of a tooth fragment, from which enamel proteins were obtained,” added co-author José María Bermúdez de Castro.
The gender change in the skeleton, formerly known as the Gran Dolina boy, occurred after researchers used modern techniques to analyze dental tissue.
“This study by our group opens up a new, highly reliable way to love sex using a non-destructive method.”
Sex estimation was achieved by studying the proportions of dental tissues in canines: the size of the enamel and dentin.
This is because the dimensions of these are sexually dimorphic traits, i.e., they are different between males and females of a species.
For this reason, this technique has been used in the past to estimate sex in forensic samples, with an accuracy of 92.3% and in fossil samples.
Teeth offer the added advantage that their formation is complete at an early stage and therefore allow sex to be loved even in immature individuals.
The team said this was a particularly useful point in the field of paleoanthropology.
For the first time they were able to confirm that the remains of the H3 individual from Gran Dolina belonged to a girl between 9 and 11 years old.
The skeleton, found in Gran Dolina, in a cave (pictured), is an example of Homo antecessor, believed to be the final common ancestor shared by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
The remains were found at the Spanish archaeological site Grand Dolina in the 1960s, and it was later determined that they died after being killed and eaten by a rival tribe.
“This individual is represented by a partial face and a fragment of the frontal bone, although he usually appears in photographs along with a jaw found in 2003 which, curiously, is considered very likely to be female,” Garcia explains.
The girl from Gran Dolina probably had a height and body proportions similar to those of a modern girl her age, although she may have developed earlier.
While not much is known yet about what his life might have been like more than 800,000 years ago, we do know something about how his story ended.
The remains found in Gran Dolina, including those of the girl, show clear evidence of cannibalism, probably the result of a confrontation between rival groups.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
WHO WERE HOMO ANCESTORS?
A realistic model of a woman predecessor of Homo is posed by removing the brains from her beheaded head
Homo antecessor is one of the first known varieties of humans discovered in Europe, dating back a million years.
It was believed to weigh about 14 stones, the predecessor Homo was said to be between 5.5 and 6 feet tall.
Their brain sizes ranged from about 1,000 to 1,150 cm, which is less than the average brain of 1,350 cm in modern humans.
The species is believed to have been a right hand, which sets it apart from other apes, and may have used symbolic language, according to archaeologists who found remains in Burgos (Spain) in 1994.
The relationship of the predecessor Homo with other Homo species in Europe has a subject of fierce debate.
Many anthropologists believe that there was an evolutionary link between Homo ergaster and Homo heidelbergensis.
Archaeologist Richard Klein claims that Homo antecessor was a completely separate species, evolving from Homo ergaster.
However, others claim that Homo antecessor is actually the same species as Homo heidelbergensis, which lived in Europe between 600,000 and 250,000 years ago in the Pleistocene era.
In 2010 stone tools were found at the same site in Happisburgh, Norfolk, which is believed to have been used by Homo’s predecessor.
Scientists believe that these first human species would reproduce with each other regularly.
Dr. Matthias Meyer, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: “The evolutionary history of archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene was quite complex.
It could be that both the ancestors of the Sima people and the Denisovans believed in another archaic group such as Homo antecessor or Homo erectus.
“Or it’s possible that the mitochondrial DNA we know from the late Neanderthals came from another group that left Africa.”