Prehistoric Bones Found In Spain Are Ancestors Of Neanderthals

In a cave in northern Spain a team of scientists has retrieved the remains of 28 prehistoric humans, members of a species that could be described as a little bit Neanderthal. They had Neanderthal faces, with heavy brows and protruding noses. They had powerful mandibles and mouths that could open extremely wide.

But they didn't have the large skulls or other robust skeletal features seen in the prototypical Neanderthals who, hundreds of millennia later, roamed Ice Age Europe. These were apparently ancestors of Neanderthals, inhabitants of a line that many thousands of years earlier had split from the ancestors of modern humans.