2009-03-12 09:00:00
We spoke with Ignacio Martínez Mendizábal.
Each layer of earth is a page of History, a silent page that keeps the secrets of the past for thousands or millions of years. The people, animals or plants that lived, the events or catastrophes that occurred while the sediments were formed, left their traces so that paleontologists will know how to read the message long later. Objects, tools, bones, plant remains, everything, even the tiny grains of pollen help to piece together the past.
When paleontologists lift a layer of earth at a site, they do it with great care because they know that by excavating that page of History it is destroyed forever. For this reason, in the Sierra de Atapuerca, in northern Spain, only a layer of a few centimeters is removed from each site each year. Any object, no matter how insignificant or irrelevant it may seem, is carefully recovered, measured, photographed, mapped and cataloged for later study. All this data is then used to create a virtual image of the destroyed layer on a computer.
A month of work, a few centimeters excavated and a whole year to study the finds, this is how progress is made. The normal thing in any paleontological site is that there are no human remains, in most cases nothing appears that deserves a headline, but the sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca are exceptional. There are fossil remains there, many fossils, more than anywhere else in the world. Every cave, every site, every centimeter of excavated land is a precious gift from the past so that we can write History.
At the site of The Chasm of Bones Fossil bones have been found from more than thirty individuals who lived more than 300,000 years ago.
The site of The Great Sink It contains the remains of a new species, new because it is unknown, which demonstrate that Europeans lived there more than 800,000 years ago. Some of the bones contain signs that seem to be signs of cannibalism. Could these fossils be the remains of a cannibal banquet?
At the site of The Elephant Chasm A 1,200,000-year-old jaw has been found.
The Trench Gallery It was a natural trap for many animals and hominids went there to locate the poor prey trapped in it.
At the site The Greater Cave Gateway the most recent history is written. Its 9 meter deep sediments contain the traces of the Romans, of the men of the Bronze Age and it is likely that it contains the remains of the collision of two different human beings: our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals. A fateful encounter that led the latter to extinction.
Our guest today, Ignacio Martínez Mendizábal, is a professor of Paleontology at the University of Alcalá. He is a researcher and Coordinator of the Human Evolution Area of the UCM-ISCIII Center for Human Evolution and Behavior. He has worked in Atapuerca since 1984 with a special interest in researching the origin of language and hearing in human evolution.
Language does not fossilize, nor do the organs involved in speech, but there is fossil evidence that can shed light on the main question: Did the hominids of Atapuerca have a speech apparatus capable of emitting sounds like us or was it more similar to that of the chimpanzee? . Listen to the story told by Ignacio Martínez in an interview conducted by Ángel Rodríguez Lozano.
#Cienciaes.com #Atapuerca #evolution #language