The site of Atapuerca closes a campaign “prodigal in archaeological and paleontological findings”, they affirm from the foundation that bears his name in a statement in which they take stock of a month of excavations. Undoubtedly, the great protagonist has been the partial face of a human being, who lived in the Sierra de Atapuerca around 1.4 million years ago and whose remains ended up in the Sima del Elefante. His discovery was made public a few days later, but he had no name at the time. Now the team led by researchers Juan Luis Arsuaga, Eudald Carbonell y Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro decided to name it ‘Pink‘, in honor of the British rock group Pink Floyd already your disk ‘The Dark Side of the Moon‘ (The dark side of the [cara] from the month).
These remains, which consist of the fragments that make up the left part of a face: a maxilla, the edge of the nose, the malar bone (which forms the cheek and part of the eye socket), and the alveoli of the teeth, They were found in sector K29, two meters below a jaw that the chasm already revealed in 2007 and which was then dated between 1.1 and 1.3 million years.
“The 2022 campaign at the Sima del Elefante site must be described as extraordinary,” they point out from the Atapuerca Foundation. The evidence for the presence of groups of hominins (subtribe of hominid primates characterized by upright posture and bipedal locomotion, ancestor of Homo sapiens) in chronologies around 1.4 million years (level 7) began to be noted last season with the discovery of a quartz flake. At the beginning of the current campaign, the identification of cut marks on a rib fragment of a medium-sized animal (deer type) confirmed said human presence in the Sierra de Atapuerca. However, the finding of the partial face of a hominid marks a new milestone in relation to the oldest human occupations in Europe, around 1.4 million years ago.”
They point out that the importance of said fossil is not only chronological, “but the rest recovered will make it possible to determine what the face of these individuals was like and to know the origin of the face of our species.”
more discoveries
Other remains recovered in this campaign are, on the one hand, a Neanderthal human tooth found at the site of the Interior Statues Gallery; and, on the other, a ‘no rest’, since it is only DNA rescued directly from the sediments of the caves, where they cooked, slept, urinated… In short, where they lived. In fact, in April of this year a publication appeared in the magazine ‘Science’ in which they explained how they extracted genetic material, without the need for bones, from the soil of two caves in the Altai mountains in Siberia (Denisova and Chagyrscaya), and , precisely, from the Gallery of the Statues of the Cueva Mayor, in Atapuerca.
320 researchers in total
During the 2022 campaign, around 320 researchers participated in the excavation of the Sima del Elefante, Galería, Gran Dolina, Cueva Fantasma sites, ─all of them located in the Trench of the Railway─; in the Cueva del Mirador; in Cueva Mayor (sites of Portalón, Sima de los Huesos and Gallery of Interior and Exterior Statues) and in the open-air settlement of Valdeprovedo.
In addition, sediment washing work has been carried out on the banks of the Arlanzón River, as it passes through Ibeas de Juarros (Burgos).