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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.

They weren't skeletons of "modern-ish" humans, they were primitive hominin, i.e. a group that includes Chimps, humans, and Australopithecus.
> 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.

What is the "specific thing"?

I don't care to explain like to a five year old, but the authors of the paper propose that only the modern human lineage have a total of four premolars in the lower jaw with a single root each. They claim these were never present in other hominid species.
I was under the impression that it was because humans learned to control fire, meaning we could eat softer food which altered the human teeth. However, 7.2m years massively predates our current understanding of when fire was first utilised..
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)

How do they know it's an ancestor instead of just a node that has a common ancestor with Homo sapiens?
I don't think they do, and I didn't see a claim in the article that this species is a direct ancestor of homo sapiens - only that we are very closely related and that they were found where we didn't expect them to be.
Fossils belonging to a species found in Greece showed similar features to the earliest known hominins (human species lineage), but were even older, shifting the "birthplace" of the modern human species from Africa to Europe.
They did fancy 3D imaging of a jaw found in Greece and a tooth found in Bulgaria. The roots and interior structures of the teeth resemble human teeth more than it appears from the outside, so maybe these belong to early humans. The fossils are pretty old, from right around the time humans split from chimps and other apes.
They found some fossils, including jawbones and teeth, in Greece belonging to an evolutionary ancestor of homo sapiens sapiens that seem to be older than those found elsewhere.
Hmm. Isn't Mesopotamia like the "cradle of civilization," and Greece is far but not terribly far from Mesopotamia. While shocking news, maybe the first civilizations came from Mesopotamia/Mediterranean Sea area because people had been there the longest?
Judging from all the existing fossils, one can assume that the prehumans started shifting into humans somewhere around East Mediterranean, but still got to Africa first and evolved there. Somewhere much later, after some migration waves of other species of humans, came the Homo Sapiens Sapiens' turn - they left Africa and only then presumably got into that final continuous settlements around Mesopotamia.
Civilization happened long after humans came about
Good point. I didn't think through this terribly much to be honest.
Easy mistake to make, there is a reason they call it 'pre-history' :-)
>Hmm. Isn't Mesopotamia like the "cradle of civilization," and Greece is far but not terribly far from Mesopotamia.

That's not really relevant, as the Mesopotamian civilizations are still millions of years after the era of the skeletons found here.

The delta between these fossils and "civilization" is almost ten million years.