The exceptional fossil strengthens the theory that humans, after emerging from their African home, struck out towards western Europe far earlier than thought, they said.

The find comprises teeth and part of a lower jawbone about four centimeters (2.5 inches) across, found in the Atapuerca hills east of the city of Burgos, the team reported in the weekly British science journal Nature.

The site, called the Sima del Elefante, comprises a cave 18 meters (58.5 feet) deep and 15 meters (48.75 feet) wide, with sediment and debris from ancient human settlement, bats and other animals forming layers many meters (feet) thick deep.

The soil layer at which the fossil was found has been dated to around 1.1-1.2 million years ago, using carbon isotope decay and palaeo-magnetism, in which reversals in Earth’s magnetic field leave a weak signal in rocks, providing a timetable of the past.

Other items included the bones of long-extinct species of weasels and mice, as well as Stone Age tools to shape flints.

The investigators, led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalonian Institute of Human Palaeo-ecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, believe the fossil is that of a Homo antecessor, a hominid branch that could be a forerunner to Homo sapiens and their enigmatic cousins, the Neanderthals.

His hypothesis — drawn from evidence from other Early Pleistocene sites on the Mediterranean — is that the humans who settled in Spain migrated there from eastern Europe.

This is in line with the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, by which humans left their ancestral home in eastern Africa and headed into the Middle East and the Caucasus before turning westwards into Europe and eastwards into South Asia in what would be a conquest of the planet.

The earliest remains of a human outside the cradle of Africa have been found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and have been dated to around 1.8 million years.

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