Atapuerca

The Museum of Human Evolution will focus its attention on explaining to the visitor the importance and meanings that excavations have for the knowledge of our evolution, in a project that will interrelate

Analyzing well-preserved fossils from the collection of the Sima de los Huesos (SH) of Atapuerca, in Burgos, Spanish scientists have estimated the stature of species such as Homo heidelbergensis, which inhabited Europe during the Middle Pleistocene and is an ancestor of the Neanderthals. The results, published in the Journal of Human Evolution and echoed by the SINC agency, show that both men and women in the Sima de los Huesos population were only slightly taller on average than men and Neanderthal women.

The latest excavations carried out in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos) have discovered the skull of a bear that lived in this area almost a million years ago. In addition, among the finds are also remains of bison and flint tools of about 370,000 years old.

Turtles were part of the menu of the first human populations around 1.2 million years ago, when they began to inhabit the Sima del Elefante in Atapuerca (Burgos), precisely at the site where the oldest human remains in Europe have been documented. .

Homo sapiens preferably use one hand over the other: there are 9 right-handers for each left-handed. But we are not the only right-handed human species. At least 500,000 years ago, the Homo heidelbergensis that lived in the Sima de los Huesos, in Atapuerca (Burgos) already preferred the right, a trait that is also observed later in Neanderthals. Both conclusions belong to a work published in the magazine Laterality and signed, among others, by Marina Lozano, a researcher at IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social).

In the journal 'Journal of Human Evolution' two articles have been published by the Atapuerca Research Team on the oldest human fossil in Europe, found in the Sima del Elefante in the Sierra de Atapuerca in 2007. It is a jaw with a chronology between 1.2 and 1.3 million years and may not belong to any known hominid species.

Today the Burgos Museum of Human Evolution is inaugurated in Burgos, an initiative whose objective is to disseminate knowledge of the evolution of our species based on archaeological findings and scientific studies carried out in the Sierra de Atapuerca sites. declared a World Heritage Site.

It has been a million years since Vallparadís, in Terrassa, was inhabited by humans, according to the remains of fauna and stone tools in its deposits. The place fills a chronological gap to know what happened between the first inhabitants of Orce 1.3 million years ago and the Homo antecessor of Atapuerca 800,000 years ago, as published today by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).