https://phys.org/news/2018-06-human-fossil-species-western-europe.html

The study shows that H. antecessor probably lived somewhere between 772 000 and 949 000 years ago. These new results are consistent with previous indirect estimates based on the dating of the sediments and associated animal fossil teeth. This early human species might also be the last common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, or very close to the point where these modern and archaic lineages are believed to have diverged (550-765 thousand years ago). The team explain their findings in a recent paper led by Dr. Duval from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, Australia, and published in the journal Quaternary Geochronology.

The Atapuerca cave system is one of the richest sites in early human fossils and stone tools in the world. Gran Dolina TD6, the site in Atapuerca where the tooth comes from, has yielded about 160 human fossils since the 1990s, all believed to belong to one species, H. antecessor. The fossil tooth's great age ruled out carbon dating as a means of determining its age. Instead, the researchers adopted a cutting-edge approach used recently on much younger human teeth. The approach combined two methods: electron spin resonance (ESR) and uranium-series (U-series) dating. A few older human fossils have been found in other sites across Western Europe. However, unlike the TD6 specimens, they couldn't be attributed to a given fossil human species.