Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered | Hacker News Reader

Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered

sciencedaily.com

66 pointsdocmechanic48 comments

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Institutional source with photos:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...

Paper with many photos and figures:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08681-0

now, run that through an AI face de-ager!

Oh, facial bones. Now Im less confused. I think the layman would call that a skull fragment.

Agreed. I was the same place: do they mean an imprint of a face? Or a partially preserved ancient artwork? No, they mean fossilised bone fragments comprising upper mouth and cheekbone areas of a human skull.

Yeah I was confused as well. "Face" isn't really a body part, it's more of a perceptual unit. It's just a piece of the front of someone's head.

Didn't humans first leave Africa 100,000 years ago by high estimates? To Western Europe 40,000 years ago?

Doesn't this completely upend early humanity?

Homo but not Homo sapiens.

> “The evidence is still insufficient for a definitive classification, which is why it has been assigned to H. aff. erectus. This designation acknowledges Pink’s affinities with Homo erectus while leaving open the possibility that it may belong to another species.” - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...

No. Human here means a species in the Homo genus. That includes a lot more than just modern humans.

Modern humans did. Other human species left Africa and populated the rest of the old world much, much earlier.

I'm not up-to-date on my research these days but it's only within the last 10K years or so (maybe even more recent) where there's been one extant human subspecies.

The craziest thing for me is that there's a lot of evidence for claiming that Sapiens interbred with other Homos, such as the Neanderthal.

Why is that crazy? Looking at human history, this doesn't come as much of a shock, does it?

Humans do like to fuck.

rishathra

Interbred is putting it mildly. More like killed the men and raped all the women. This was repeated again with the Yamnaya from the Caucasus a few millennia ago where they again killed all the men and raped all the women.

How certainly do we actually know that? If the evidence you claim is that there are no Y-chromosomes from other hominids, an alternative explanation could be that hybrids with Y-chromosomes from other hominids did exist, but disappeared gradually over the centuries/millenia either because they were less fit or through pure chance.

Are there any now living people with mt-dna from other hominids?

Having a minority non-autosomal genotype could be an issue as there might be recurring "compatibility problems", given that the autosomal dna would mainly evolve to work with the majority mtdna and ydna.

The genetic evidence points into the other direction:

> There is considerably less Neanderthal ancestry on the X-chromosome compared to the autosomal chromosomes, which similarly suggests that admixture with modern humans was primarily the result of mating between modern human females and Neanderthal males.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics#Parentage

Chicks dig those big, furry eyebrows.

a lot of evidence as in most europeans, eurasians and east asians have some percentage of neanderthal genes in their DNA

If you’ve seen Star Trek the Original Series it shows you precisely how much humans are into humanoid subspecies. They could be green for all a dude who hasn’t seen a woman in a week could care!

> They could be green for all a dude who hasn’t seen a woman in a week could care!

Not a great example; the green women are specifically shown to exert pheromonal control over alien males.

I can't smell them on TV, and Vina the Orion still had a lot of control over me.

Isnt neanderthal sapiens. Also, not all modern humans

"sapiens" is our species name. They are Homo neanderthalis, so they are Homo, which is probably what you were intending.

What if the literature of God Created men(mankind) in his image came to differentiate Homo sapiens from others.

Or the history really began once the other Humans were no more ?

Just passing thoughts

There are at least several thousand years between the last non-modern human hominids dying out and the first writing emerging.

About 20,000 years in fact.

I've been thinking about this a lot, by coincidence, as I read Unsong by Scott Alexander (unsongbook.com). It's a beautifully written somewhat comic and somewhat tragic story about the kabbalic-turned-capitalist search for the powerful Names of God.

It occurred to me that, if the Abrahamic God exists, and the origin of Adam is anything more than a mere metaphor, God must have had to make a decision at some point. "There!", He/She/It said as the last vital chromosome fell into place in generation Aleph-1, "All this work is finally done. Whew! I could use some rest." Or something.

But maybe it's all metaphor (except for the God existing part). Maybe the Garden of Eden was Us (big-us, all the hominids) co-existing without technology, and the rise of flint-knapping/agriculture/representational art/whatever was the "eating of the fruit and gaining of knowledge".

Or any other variation you like, as long as you're not intentionally bound from thinking by a literalist view of the Torah's Book of Genesis. In which case, I have bad news: "Adam" wasn't even named that in the early writings, presumably closer to God's word. So, your translation is a bad start for you.

So, maybe the "Twelve Tribes of Israel" are themselves metaphoric for the whole set of hominin branches. Maybe "Ham" was Paranthropus. Accepting that "seven" in the bible sometimes implies "an important big number", maybe "seven" generations later (give or take a few 100) Paranthropus died out completely. Poor Ham. He was just checking to make sure Dad didn't oversleep.

Or maybe, there is no God, and it's just fun to play with myths, which are culturally powerful.

It's not hard to see how "leaving the garden" can be interpreted as us leaving nature. We're the only animal that doesn't really jive with the rest of the ecosystem.

> "Adam" wasn't even named that in the early writings, presumably closer to God's word.

Citation needed. What was he named in the early writings?

Thank you for calling me on this.

He seems to have been "Adamah", or "dirt" - which is not far removed from "Adam", I'll grant.

But "Eve" is the one that really changed. She was named by Adam "Ishah", feminine version of "ish"/man. Or maybe "Chivah", a variation on the Hebrew word for life. I'm not clear. Then the Greeks made her "Zoe".... Fast forward a few hundred years, and a couple languages, and it becomes "Eve".

An early computer translating program took "out of sight, out of mind" to Russian and back, and returned "invisible insanity". A fairly reasonable translation, in some respects.

My point is really this: Biblical literalists who only read it in their native tongue are making indefensible claims about meaning.

> Other human species left Africa and populated the rest of the old world much, much earlier.

Usually those would be called hominids, not humans.

Article says this skull fragment is possibly Homo Erectus.

This says they left Africa within in that time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus

This has further details on human evolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution

This covers in more detail the time modern humans migrated from Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...

> Ah-ha! But no one has found the missing link between ape and this so called Homo habilis

Using the term "missing link" instantly flags you as not having a serious evolutionary background.

We don't find "missing links". Ever, really. They existed, but the fossil record is far too small a sampling to gift us like that.

It's a joke/quote from Futurama

Context: https://comb.io/osyksW

Yeah, but I’d sure like to see one of those wolves that became a whale.

No the homo genus includes everything from something barely distinguishable from an gorilla all the way to modern humans.

Only if you can't tell a gorilla from a chimpanzee.

Neither are first-cousins to Homo, which is descended from genii since the split from the shoot that Bonobos came from.

All homo species are or were bipedal tool users and descended from ancestors that had been bipedal tool users for a million years prior. You wouldn't get them confused with a gorilla.

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/files/2016/10/Homo-habilis-r...

Homo habilis looks like a slight shorter haired gorilla.

No.

You're confusing chimps with gorillas.

Here's video of a gorilla that is famous for its ability and propensity for walking upright. If you want to tell me you would find this "barely distinguishable" from homo habilis, I don't think I'd be doing you a service by believing you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVYzogbTs0w

You dont still believe that do you?

More info in the press release from UCL at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/mar/fragment-human-face-aged...

'The discovery of a human facial fragment aged over one million years represents the oldest known face in western Europe and confirms the region was inhabited by two species of human during the early Pleistocene, finds a new study.'

They don't look a day over 900,000 years.

Insert Joan Rivers joke here

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