The discoveries of fossils of fauna, lithic industry and to a lesser extent, humans, take place in the Burgos mountain range, where the oldest DNA and stone tool in Europe have recently been found. Although a latest investigation placed the age of its most archaic sediments at 900,000 years, the team of paleontologists, in the middle of an excavation campaign, plans to make their way to still hidden caves of earlier chronology, which house hominid remains from 2 million years ago , a dating only found to date in the ” Cradle of Humanity “, in Olduvai (Tanzania).
Atapuerca monopolizes world attention by having the oldest European species, Homo Antecessor, to which another more recent species could be added, based on the 17 skulls found in the Sima de los Huesos, and also a much older one, which would compete in age with Australopithecus remains found on the African continent. And it is that the team of paleontologists, led by Eudald Carbonell, José María Bermúdez de Castro and Juan Luis Arsuaga , intends to present a new evolutionary map at the end of the year in view of the need to review the nomenclature of many of the species discovered in the last decades. In this regard, Arsuaga has pointed out that ” Atapuerca should be the reference for the proposal of the new genus Homo “, both for the quantity and for the quality of the remains found, because as he himself pointed out, “this is the great site of the recent history”.
That is why among the objectives of its campaign that year, which is already in its equator, highlights the exploration of new enclaves in the site such as the “cave of ghosts.” There the researchers hope to find remains that are around two million years old, which would be an unprecedented anthropological milestone in Europe, matching the famous finds made in the Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania.
And it is that as one of the co-directors of the Atapuerca deposit, José María Bermúdez de Castro, explained in a visit to different media, ” Atapuerca is like a great encyclopedia in which the different chapters have to be ordered .”
Atapuerca will continue to be in the spotlight for a long time as it still houses hundreds of fossils that, although they are already located by paleontologists, it will take decades for them to reach the depths that bury them.
