Blue Star Chronicles

British forensic scientist Richard Neave has a clay sculpture in the image of the first European. The sculpture has been created using fossilized fragments of skull and jawbone that are over 35,000 years old. Read about the first modern European and see his or her photo and a video below.

The First European

A few years ago we learned that all of mankind has a common ancestor. The 3.2-million-year-old bones of our Ethiopian mother of mankind were named ‘Lucy’. She was named after the Beatles song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ shortly after her discovery. She has been a source of interest and controversy since she was discovered in the 1970s.

Now the fossilized remains of the first modern European has been found and reconstructed to give us the first glimpse of what the common ancestor of Europeans might have looked like. Lucy was a now extinct species of hominid that evolved into homo sapiens. Unlike his predecessor, the European is a fully evolved homo sapien who could pass for a modern day human. But then, there were a few million years of evolution between Lucy and the European.

As a forensic scientist, Richard Neave is accustomed to recreating features from human remains. Of course, generally, his subjects are much more recently deceased. Neave has studied the traits of populations and states that the shape of the skull doesn’t fit the profile of what he would normally expect of Europeans, Africans or Asians. Rather, he seems to be a combination of all of those. That’s not at all surprising considering that he is apparently one of the first to venture from the African continent into Europe.

The head is based on remains of one of the earliest known anatomically modern Europeans.

The lower jawbone was discovered by potholers in the Carpathian mountains in Romania in 2002. The rest of the fragments were found the following year.

The bones were carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by two species of human.

They were the Neanderthals, who had arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and the more recent modern humans, also known as Cro-Magnons.

Although the skull is similar to a modern human head, it has a larger cranium, is more robust and has larger molars. Although it is impossible to work out the skin colour of the prehistoric hunter, it is likely to have been darker than modern white Europeans.

Fossil experts are also unsure if the skull was male or female.

Many scientists believe that modern humans evolved in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors left Africa around 60,000 years ago and migrated around the world, replacing other branches of the family tree which had left the continent earlier.

The earliest modern Europeans were far from primitive. Living in huts and caves, they used stone tools and spears made from antlers, painted on the walls of their caves and made jewellery from shells.

The head was created for a BBC2 show titled The Incredible Human Journey. The series will follow the evolution of humans as they migrated out from Africa and settled throughout the world. Bristol University anthropologist Alice Roberts will be the show’s hostess.

You can learn more about our yet unnamed first European on The Incredible Human Journey that is scheduled to air on May 10, 2009. I hope we’ll get to see it here in the States.