Miguelón is the popular nickname for a human skull of the Sima de los Huesos hominins, classified as belonging to the "Neanderthal clade". One of the best preserved skulls in the human fossil record, it has been estimated to date to 430,000 years ago. It is one of more than 5,500 fossils belonging to early human populations which have been found in the Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones") site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. thumb|left|Another view of the cranium 5 of Atapuerca. The excavators suggest that this concentration of bones in the pit may represent the practice of buria
Miguelón is the popular nickname for a human skull of the Sima de los Huesos hominins, classified as belonging to the "Neanderthal clade". One of the best preserved skulls in the human fossil record, it has been estimated to date to 430,000 years ago. It is one of more than 5,500 fossils belonging to early human populations which have been found in the Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones") site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. thumb|left|Another view of the cranium 5 of Atapuerca. The excavators suggest that this concentration of bones in the pit may represent the practice of burial by the inhabitants of the cave. A competing theory cites the lack of small bones in the assemblage and suggests that the remains were washed into the pit by natural agents.
Evidence in the form of genetic analysis suggests that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were ancestral to later Neanderthals. Subsequently, there is debate about whether to include them within Homo heidelbergensis or whether they represent early members of Homo neanderthalensis.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).