A study conducted by a team of international scientists suggested that human body has undergone four stages of evolution. The scientists found about the human body’s evolution after analyzing a collection of 430,000-year-old fossils from the Sima de los Huesos in Spain’s Sierra de Atapuerca.

According to the team, the fossils suggested that individuals from the Sierra de Atapuerca were tall and muscular. Those ancient humans shared a number of anatomical features with Neanderthals. After analyzing Atapuerca humans’ postcranial skeletons, the researchers found that they were closely related evolutionarily to Neanderthals.

Rolf Quam, anthropologist at the Binghamton University and part of the international team of researchers, said, “This is really interesting since it suggests that the evolutionary process in our genus is largely characterized by stasis (i.e. little to no evolutionary change) in body form for most of our evolutionary history”.

The team compared the Atapuerca fossils with other human fossil records and found that human body’s evolution has gone through four major and different stages, which depend on degree of arboreality and bipedalism. The fossils from Sierra de Atapuerca represented the third stage of evolution when humans were tall and had robust bodies, the researchers said.

This same body type was present in human genus’ earlier members, like Homo erectus, and in some later members, such as the Neanderthals. It means the body form was present in the genus Homo for more than a million years.