When farmer Tomás Serrano was digging in his fields near Orce in Granada in 1976, he came across 'stones that resemble bones'. The ensuing excavations turned up a skull fragment believed to be from Europe's earliest hominid, but within a year, some experts argued that 'Orce Man' was in fact 'Orce Donkey', as a cranial ridge implied that it might be from an equine species instead.

The archaeologists were ridiculed, but it turns out they weren’t so far off. In 2002, a child’s tooth was discovered at nearby Barranco León that was an incredible 1.4 million years old – the oldest homo genus remains on the continent.

Ranked: Spain’s most extraordinary archaeological discoveries