Spanish archeologists have recently named the oldest hominid ever discovered in Europe, Pink: which they named after Pink Floyd, the legendary English rock band.
Newsweek reported that remnants of the ancient ancestor of humans, dating back roughly 1.4 million years, were excavated earlier this year in northern Spain.
Archaeologists named the 1.4 million-year-old fossil "Pink," in honor of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album. https://t.co/qCCOXOCnEd
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) July 27, 2022
The team discovering the hominid remnants include Juan Luis Arsuaga, Eudald Carbonell, and Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro.
The team said it is an honor of the successful rock band Pink Floyd and their Dark Side of the Moon, a classic album.
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Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa
'Amazingly' Well-Preserved Remnants
The discovered pieces make up the left part of the ancient human's face and comprise the maxilla, the edge of the nose, the malar bone, which forms the cheek and part of the eye socket, and dental alveoli, the joe sockets for the human teeth.
What's described as "amazingly well-preserved remains" were found at Level TE7 at the Sima del Elefante area in the Atapuerca Mountains north of Spain, as described in the Infogalactic website.
Fundacion Atapuerca, the archeological organization responsible for such a discovery, said in a statement that the discovery of the star this year was a human being's partial face, who lived and died around 1.4 million years ago in the Sierra de Atapuerca.
This then is the face of the first-ever European, which promises to be critical in studies on the arising of modern faces.
Named After Pink Floyd
The emblematic find being talked about that the research team has decided to provide this fossil with its name, which from now on, will be known as Pink, as a tribute to the legendary album by the said popular rock band, released in the early 1970s, as mentioned, entitled The Dark Side of the Moon.
Pit of the Elephant, or Sima del Elefante, has produced the earliest human remnants in western Europe. Furthermore, other essential discoveries include pieces of the archaic human Homo antecessors like teeth and jawbone that date from 1.2 to 0.8 million years back.
Moreover, the said fragments were discovered in Sima del Elefante's Gran Dolina cave in the early 1990s, while the species itself was described officially as the last common ancestor in 1997 of modern humans and Neanderthals.
The most recent discovery was carried out by Edgar Tellez, a research team who noticed a few remnants of the bone covered in clay late last month.
Remnants Originated from a Human Jaw
Describing their research, the researchers said that after "cleaning and scrutiny" by several team specialists, they could already verify that the remnants came from a human jaw.
The fossil discovery is crucial to understanding the evolutionary origins of the ancient hominids outside of Africa.
According to Fundacion Atapuerca, approximately 320 study investigators had taken part in unearthing work at their sites over the past year.
A report about the recent fossil discovery is shown on Zenger's YouTube video below:
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