Adrian Pablos, from Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) and the Universidad de Burgos (UBU) es is coauthor of a study, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, about the Early Pleistocene hand phalanx (ATE9-2) from the Sima del Elefante in Atapuerca, (Spain), ascribed to Homo sp., which was found in 2008, which evidences that hand morphology has hardly changed since 1,3 million yeras ago.

In this study, a new Early Pleistocene proximal hand phalanx (ATE9-2) from the Sima del Elefante cave site (TE – Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain), ascribed to Homo sp., is presented and comparatively described in the context of the evolution of the genus Homo.

The ATE9-2 specimen is especially important because of the paucity of hand bones in the human fossil record during the Early Pleistocene. The morphological and metrical analyses of the phalanx ATE9-2 indicate that there are no essential differences between it and comparator fossil specimens for the genus Homo after 1.3 Ma (millions of years ago).

Similar to Sima de los Huesos and Neandertal specimens, ATE9-2 is a robust proximal hand phalanx, probably reflecting greater overall body robusticity in these populations or a higher gracility in modern humans. The age of level TE9 from Sima del Elefante and morphological and metrical studies of ATE9-2 suggest that the morphology of the proximal hand phalanges and, thus, the morphology of the hand could have remained stable over the last 1.2–1.3 Ma.

This study entitled "Early Pleistocene human hand phalanx from the Sima del Elefante (TE) cave site in Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain)2 has been carried out by a Spanish scientific team from CENIEH, IPHES, UBU, and Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, lead by Carlos Lorenzo, from Institut Catalá de Paleoecologia Humana y Evolució Social (IPHES) and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili de Tarragona (URV).