Atapuerca in brief
The Sierra de Atapuerca is a hill range near Burgos in northern Spain. Its limestone is riddled with caves and fissures that have filled with sediments, animal bones, stone tools and human remains. The sites together span about 1.2 million years of human presence, and more fossils of early humans have been found here than anywhere else in Europe. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 2000.
How it was found
The caves became visible in the 1890s, when a railway was cut through the hills to carry ore. The cutting sliced through several caves and exposed bones. For decades the fossils were thought to be mostly animals. In the 1960s a team led by Francisco Jordá dug in some of the caves. In the 1970s Trinidad Torres, a student at the time, was studying the cave bear bones in the Sima de los Huesos, and in 1976 the first human bones there were recognised, and a team under Emiliano Aguirre began systematic excavations in 1978. His successors, Juan Luis Arsuaga, José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell, have led the work since the late 1980s.
The main sites
- Sima de los Huesos (“pit of bones”). A chamber reached through a 13-metre vertical shaft, deep inside the Cueva Mayor. Excavation since 1984 has produced more than 6,500 human bones from at least 28 individuals, about 430,000 years old. They look like early Neanderthals, and ancient DNA, recovered in 2013 and 2016, confirms that they were on the Neanderthal branch of the family tree. Why so many bodies ended up in a pit is argued: the leading idea is that people deliberately placed their dead there, which would be among the earliest funeral behaviour known. One of the finds is a pink quartzite handaxe, nicknamed Excalibur, that may have been left as an offering.
- Gran Dolina. A cave filled by sediments, cut by the railway. A layer called TD6, about 850,000 to 800,000 years old, produced the remains of at least six individuals of Homo antecessor, a species named in 1997, which means “pioneer” or “explorer”. Cut marks on their bones, and on animal bones in the same layer, show that some of the people were butchered and eaten by others. A face from there, belonging to a boy of about 10 or 11, has a mix of modern and primitive features.
- Sima del Elefante. A cave fill with a lower jaw and stone tools about 1.2 million years old, some of the oldest evidence of humans in western Europe.
- Galería and other caves. Later layers of Neanderthal and Bronze Age occupation, and cave art.
Why Atapuerca matters
Atapuerca gives an unusually long and dense record of how people lived in Europe, and it has been used to follow the development of the Neanderthal line from its early stages. Homo antecessor was first suggested as a possible common ancestor of Neanderthals and our own species, but studies of its proteins in 2020 indicated instead that it was a close relative of that ancestor, on a side branch, so its place in the family tree is still under discussion. The Sima de los Huesos shows that Neanderthal features, such as the face and the teeth, were present more than 400,000 years ago.
Visiting
The Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, opened in 2010, shows many of the fossils and reconstructions of the sites. The Atapuerca archaeological park, a short distance away, runs guided tours of the excavation areas in summer, when the digs are active. The Sima de los Huesos itself is closed to the public.
Sources
- Arsuaga, J. L. and others (1997). The Sima de los Huesos crania (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain). Journal of Human Evolution 33: 219 to 281.
- Bermúdez de Castro, J. M. and others (1997). A hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: possible ancestor to Neandertals and modern humans. Science 276: 1392 to 1395.
- Meyer, M. and others (2016). Nuclear DNA sequences from the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins. Nature 531: 504 to 507.
- Welker, F. and others (2020). The dental proteome of Homo antecessor. Nature 580: 235 to 238.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Archaeological Site of Atapuerca.