Figure 3

Excavating a skull of Homo heidelbergenis inside the Pit of the Bones, Atupuerca (Spain)

(Photo Credit: Javier Trueba / Madraid Scientific Films)

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Dinesh ^club

Around half a million years ago a clan of people lived in some of the valleys of northern Spain, close to today’s cathedral city of Burgos. To all intents and purposes they were recognizably human. They were intelligent, tall, and well built: they averaged 1.75 meters in stature, weighed around 95 milos, had brains of comparable size of ours, 5,000 human fossils belonging to at least 28 individuals have now been recovered in the Sima de los Huesos (the Pit of Bones), a shaft within a cave in the hills of Atapuerca, and it has been estimated that they represent 90% of all known fossils from this period. (Figure 3)

How did the bones get there? That is a question that remains cloaked in uncertainty, and like so many prehistory’s enigma, wrapped up in controversy. One group of scientists working here believe that the large numbers of human fossils, in the virtual absence of other animal remains except of the cave bears, is proof that this was not a place in which people sheltered and brought the animals that they had hunted. It was instead, a place where they buried their dead, proof of the complexity of their behaviour and self-awareness. The discovery, in 1998 of a beautifully-carved hand-axe among the human remains supposedly added weight to the argument as it suggested that this was a special implement that has formed part of burial ritual. . . . Page 23/23

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

4 months ago.

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