Petralona 1 - Discovered by villagers at Petralona in Greece in 1960. Estimated age is 250,000-500,000 years. It could alternatively be considered to be a late Homo erectus, and also has some Neandertal characteristics. The brain size is 1220 cc, high for erectus but low for sapiens, and the face is large with particularly wide jaws.
Atapuerca 5 - Discovered in the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") at the Atapuerca cave site in northern Spain in 1992 and 1993 by Juan-Luis Arsuaga. It is about 300,000 years old, with a brain size of 1125 cc. The face is broad with a huge nasal opening, and resembles Neandertals in some traits but not in others. This is the most complete pre-modern skull in the entire hominid fossil record.
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"Old Man" - Discovered by Amedee and Jean Bouyssonie in 1908 near La-Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. It is about 50,000 years old, with a brain size of 1620 cc. This specimen was between about 30 and 40 when he died, but had a healed broken rib, severe arthritis of the hip, lower neck, back and shoulders, and had lost most of his molar teeth. The fact that he survived as long as he did indicates that Neandertals must have had a complex social structure.
"Cro-Magnon Man" - Discovered by workmen in 1868 at Cro-Magnon, in the village of Les Eyzies in France. The estimated age of the site is 30,000 years. It's a male with a brain size of 1600 cc, some 200 cc larger than the average modern human. If Cro-Magnons were modern humans, does that mean that modern humans are Cro-Magnons? Not really. Logically, many modern humans should be, since most modern Europeans are probably descended from them. But the term has no taxonomic significance and usually just refers to Europeans in a certain time range, even though other modern humans were living throughout much of the world at the same time.
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Evidence and observation are the building blocks of all scientific inquiry; evolutionary science is no different. Evidence in the form of the fossil record, geological formations, and genetics attest to change having taken place and give clues to how evolution works. Fossils show us a great deal about earlier human evolution. The fossil record certainly has gaps, mostly because the conditions required to create fossils have been rare ever since life began on Earth. A very small percentage of animals that have lived and died ever became fossils. Thus, many pieces of the puzzle are missing; some will never be found. Nonetheless, we have many, many fossils that illustrate evolutionary transitions between fish and amphibians, between reptiles and mammals, between dinosaurs and birds, and in many lineages such as whales and horses. And new fossils continue to reveal transitional forms that some said don't exist.
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