Fossil hominin skull reconstruction. Conservation technician reconstructing the Aroeira 3 cranium, a fossil skull that dates from around 400,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene. It was found in 2014 in the Gruta da Aroeira cave in Portugal by a group led by Spanish palaeoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga. The results of the discovery were published in 2017, with initial findings indicating that the skull has traits associated with the early stages of the evolution of Neanderthals. Neanderthals, a hominin species closely related to modern humans, evolved between 800,000 and 400,000 years ago, and went extinct around 40,000 years ago.