Sima de los Huesos

The Sima de los Huesos hominins are a 430,000-year-old population of pre-Neanderthals from the archeological site of Atapuerca, Spain. They are in the "Neanderthal clade", but fall outside Homo neanderthalensis. When first reported in 1993, these 29 individuals were about 80 percent of the human fossil record of the Middle Pleistocene. Every bone is preserved, and the unprecedented completeness of the remains sheds light on Neanderthal evolution, the classification of contemporary fossils, and variations in a single Middle Pleistocene population. Exhumation of the Sima de los Huesos hominins began in the 1980s under the direction of Emiliano Aguirre and, later, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Eudald Carbonell, and José María Bermúdez de Castro. They have a mosaic of "classic" Neanderthal traits (apomorphies) and more "archaic" traits (plesiomorphies). Like Neanderthals, the brow ridges are inflated; the skull is not as robust in the rear, however, and has a pointed "house-like" profile instead of a rounded "bomb-like" one. Brain volume averages 1,241 cc (75.7 cu in), on the lower end of the Neanderthal range. The teeth are Neanderthal-like, with shovel-shaped incisors and taurodontism, but differ in cusp morphology. The chest and waist are broad and robust like Neanderthals, but the limbs are longer. They may have been large-bodied overall, like other archaic humans, with a height of about

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