The archaeological sites of Atapuerca (Burgos) are being prepared for a “festival of finds” of different antiquities in the next campaignafter concluding the current one with progress in one of its most emblematic areas: the Gran Dolina, said this Friday one of the co-directors of the sites declared World Heritage Sites, Eudald Carbonell.
Another of the co-directors, José María Bermúdez de Castro, explained at the campaign’s annual press conference that this summer “everything was ready” to reach level 6 of Gran Dolina, where the remains of Homo Antecessor, a hominid from 800,000 years ago only described in Atapuerca and is considered as the first genuinely European human species Until now.
His forecast is that in the next five or six years, more than 300 remains of these hominids, more than a thousand lithic tools and hundreds of animals hunted and eaten by them can be removed from that site, in an area of about 25 square meters.
In fact, in this summer’s campaign the upper part of that level has barely been scratched and fragments of a parietal bone and the phalanx of a toe have already been found.
In this campaign, they have also finished removing the remains of hundreds of bears that were found in another site, Sima de los Huesos, which were on the remains of pre-Neanderthal hominids from 400,000 years ago, which they will also reach in the 2024 campaign.