Homo antecessor

The findings on this subject 199 were rejected by some evolutionist paleoanthropologists, because of their damaging implications for the evolutionary family tree. One fossil discovered in Atapuerca in Spain in 1995 revealed in a most striking manner that H. sapiens was far older than had been thought. (See Atapuerca.) This fossil indicated that the history of H. sapiens needed to be put back to at least 800,000 years ago. However, once they had got over their initial shock, evolutionists decided that the fossil belonged to a different species, because—according to the evolutionary family tree—H. sapiens could not have been alive 800,000 years ago. They therefore came up with an imaginary species known as Homo antecessor, to which they ascribed the Atapuerca skull.

199 L.S.B. Leakey, The Origin of Homo sapiens, ed. F. Borde, Paris: UNESCO, 1972, pp. 25-29; L.S.B. Leakey, By the Evidence, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.