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The location and extreme age of the Serbian jawbone also places the individual along a crucial migration corridor that joins Europe and Asia, a mountainous region that offered a southern refuge for early humans from the ebb and flow of glaciers that made much of Europe intermittently uninhabitable.

The Canadian-led team published its findings this week in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One.

The researchers conclude that the age, location and features of the jawbone indicate it may have come from a population of early humans that was regularly “repopulating” Europe between ice ages, gradually giving rise to more advanced Neanderthal lineages and human ancestors. “It’s the oldest human fossil that’s ever been found there,” Prof. Rink told Postmedia News.

“As the results were coming out of the computer, I could see that everything was in agreement,” he added. “That was amazing. When it comes out older than you expect, everybody just celebrates — we were thinking 250,000 or 300,000 (years old), but when it came out older than 400,000, we were ecstatic.”

Prof. Roksandic said the jawbone may represent a common ancestor or “precursor” species for both Neanderthals and modern humans.

“It’s very important,” she said in an interview, “because in this time period – about half a million years ago – this is when we start to see, in Africa and Eurasia, hominids with bigger brains and other changes that begin to tell us: something really human is happening here.”

Prof. Rink remembers informing the French scientist involved in the study, who was testing cave sediments to determine their age, about the bone findings from Canada. “He told me, ‘I haven’t said anything to anybody because I wasn’t sure if the results were meaningful. But it agrees exactly with your results.’