Scientists find 7.2M-year-old pre-human remains in the Balkans

They found two really old skeletons in Europe that are older than other skeletons. They are skeletons of a "modern"-ish human. They know because the teeth of the skeletons have a specific thing that the teeth of humans have but not the teeth of other primates.

The older skeleton is 1 million years older than old skeletons found in Africa. So now the oldest skeletons that we know about come from Europe not Africa, raising the possibility that humans evolved in Europe.

The title is misleading (as written on HN) because the meaning of "hominim" is more to do with what we, humans, and other hominim (like neanderthals etc) evolved from. See linked chart:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yEUEavwMSCE/ULtMp3e_cVI/AAAAAAAAAD...

This isn't our specific species but rather whatever we and similar species evolved from.

I'm absolutely no expert on the subject.

I actually find the title offensive if I'm right but I'd happily be wrong. Mostly because I'm sensitive to how unlikely it is people are up voting this because they understand it and rather they want it to reflect their world views.

Edit: for those downvoting me, could you explain why? I'm happy to learn. It's just weird to see a sudden surge in down votes with no comments explaining how I am ignorant or wrong.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's being suggested that Graecopithecus is a species that modern humans are descended from. Late Miocene sounds like an era in the history of the world.

How?

Aside from that, this are just the oldest known fossils with human traits, how will your world view change if we find evidence of an even older ancestor outside Europe?

We have chimps, and we have humans. But both of us share a common ancestor. At some point, we split into two different evolutionary lines. And it's _where_, geographically, we split that is under some investigation.

Current school of thought, we think that man originated in Africa. But this recent finding (based off of a partial skull fragment) shows that non-chimp pre-humans existed in Europe, possibly hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously theorised.

This means the split may have happened in Europe, as that is now the earliest evidence of pre-human remains.

(that's how I understand it, at least)