The new (and promising) excavation campaign begins in Atapuerca

The month of July is very special in the Burgos town of Ibeas de Juarros. The bars are full of customers who consume coffees, infusions and something sweet or salty to snack on. Many are researchers who are arriving in a slow but continuous trickle to the place where they have been. The predominant uniform is practically the same: backpack, appropriate footwear and comfortable clothes, yes, of varied colors. Hours and hours of frantic search await ahead. Paletín, charcoal and buckets that make countless round trips between filling and emptying within each of the many sites that make up the archaeological complex of the Sierra de Atapuerca. The party begins. Fossils and utensils wait slowly among its ancient sediments to be treated like the jewel they are, since Atapuerca is a unique place that has hidden the secrets of evolution for more than 800,000 years.

In the summer of 2021, activity has resumed at a higher rate thanks to twice the number of troops, approximately 120 people. Researchers in search of a kind of archaeo-anthropological catharsis guilty of the fact that the detail in the specializations is increasingly insultingly explicit. Until today, the Sierra de Atapuerca has fostered a whopping 115 doctoral theses and around 1,000 scientific articles –in addition to essays, fiction, newspapers, specialized magazines, general publications and a long etcetera–. Archaeology, paleontology, geology... all focused on scientific research, but also with the aim of dissemination, of the dissemination of knowledge among society. That is the ultimate goal: to impregnate society with science so that the findings feel their own, to make them part of the circle of actors that celebrates the scientific milestones achieved.

A new economic push

Like every year, the search for economic funds is essential to maintain the excavations in Atapuerca. According to Gumersindo Bueno - general director of heritage of the Junta de Castilla y León -, last year there was a slower pace at the level of research but he took advantage of it to work "on" the field rather than "in" the field, carrying out various works to guarantee safety at the site, such as the replacement of the gigantic roof of Cueva Fantasma and the reform of the tubular structure of the Gran Dolina site.

In addition, between 2018 and 2024, aid is planned for innovative projects that generate knowledge and dissemination – including universities and private companies – with the idea of ​​promoting vocations and always bearing in mind that the ultimate recipient is the general public. In total, the maximum budget from the Board is estimated at €440,000.

And it is that, as Juan Luis Arsuaga, co-director of Atapuerca, pointed out, this site is the envy of all. A place with which the deposits of the whole world are compared. It is not surprising that various institutional spheres support the creation of centers such as the Museum of Human Evolution (MEH) in Burgos, the National Research Center for Human Evolution (CENIEH) or the University of Burgos (UBU). However, it has not always been this way. The beginnings were complicated.

Currently the Foundation has a very powerful human and economic mechanism, fostered by the enormous amount of remains that are found each season. Precisely these fossils that appear each year help dozens of researchers from around the world become interested each summer in the richest mountain range found to date. In fact, at the level of scientific content, the project has achieved two publications in Nature in six months –one of them the cover of the most prestigious scientific journal in the world– and a cover in Science. For example, for the first time in history, DNA from five Neanderthals has been recovered directly from the sediment, without the need for a fossil.

A fully productive field

In some excavation seasons paleontological work has not been carried out in certain areas. However, as Eudald Carbonell, co-director of Atapuerca, pointed out, "this year all the sites in the mountains will be excavated again". The Atapuerca Research Team is already working on the sites of Sima del Elefante, Galería, Gran Dolina, and Cueva Fantasma –all of them located in the Trench of the Railroad–; in Portalón, Gallery of Interior and Exterior Statues, Sima de los Huesos and in the Sala de los Cíclopes, located in Cueva Mayor; as well as in the Cueva del Mirador, La Paredeja and in the washing and triage train on the banks of the Arlanzón river.

what is to come

In the Sima del Elefante, level 7 is being excavated, the oldest of those located in the Sierra de Atapuerca with a chronology of 1.3 million years. The importance of this site lies in the fact that, thanks to the information collected, it has been possible to establish that the environmental conditions in the mountains at that time were more temperate and humid than today. A small survey is looking for the base of the cavity to locate the floor and ceiling of the deposit.

In the Gallery, the fundamental objective is to continue with the excavation of the lower section of Unit GIIIa in all sectors of the site. The work will be focused on defining and continuing with the concentration of fossils that began to emerge at the end of the 2019 campaign. Section TG10A of the sequence is one of the richest archaeologically and is dated at around 300,000 years. It has an exceptional preservation of faunal remains, in association with the Acheulean lithic industry.

In the upper part of the Gran Dolina site, open work will be resumed on the crusted and partially eroded sediment of a couple of levels with the aim of revealing their paleontological and archaeological content, and delimiting them to better understand their relationship with the immediately underlying units. . The interest focuses mainly on the 900,000 year old section of the site due to the identified occupations and those of the Acheulean from 450,000 years ago. So that the few gaps that remain in the sequence can continue to be filled for the last million years, which is said soon. There is confirmed presence of hominids almost every 100,000 years up to that million. In the lower part of the site it is expected to find remains of cervids and ursids, from the Lower Pleistocene. That macrofauna and the microfauna that are found will serve as biochronological indicators that allow obtaining information on the environmental conditions existing 1 million years ago.

For its part, in the Cueva Fantasma it is planned to continue with the stratigraphic surveys to see the archaeo-paleontological vertical sequence of the cavity, and in the zone of Sala Fantasma it will continue to advance in extension to learn more about the occupation and characterization of the site. In the El Mirador cave, work will be carried out on Neolithic levels, corresponding to the phase in which the cavity was used as a sheepfold cave. Between the approximately 5,700 years of one and the 6,700 years of antiquity of the other, which will provide relevant information on the process of establishing livestock in the Iberian Peninsula.

La Paredeja will host an intervention to see its definitive power, a site that will most likely be the last to be excavated this year.

The wonders of the Cueva Mayor

The Cueva Mayor complex is a true spectacle. The Portalón and the Gallery of the Statues (Interior and Exterior), the Sima de los Huesos and the Sala de los Cíclopes contain amazing information. The Holocene sequence of El Portalón has led to world-class scientific research, although no less important is the discovery of the nuclear genome of at least five Neanderthals in the sediment itself, which has constituted an unprecedented milestone in the prehistoric sciences. In addition, fossils of bears have been found in several places in the Hall of the Cyclops and it is thought that it is in this large hall that the keys to understanding the accumulation of human corpses in the Sima de los Huesos are found.

And all the sediment that is found in time and form in each of the deposits that make up the Atapuerca deposit must go through the washing and screening station on the banks of the Arlanzón River in order to recover the microfauna that inhabited the Sierra de Atapuerca hundreds of thousands of years ago. Tiny fossils of mammals, amphibians, birds, reptiles, fish... that may be the key to understanding what happened thousands of years ago. A laborious job in which up to a ton of sediment is processed per day.

The entire human evolution

All human evolution has been in Atapuerca for the last 1.3 million years. Something that requires a unique treatment, because not only fossil information has been obtained, but there is also a climatic, economic record, etc. And the future is quite promising. For example, it is likely that in this or the next few seasons, fossils will emerge that will help with the archaeo-paleontological interpretation of Homo antecessor. Throughout all these years, enough experience has been acquired to be able to predict another important stage of discoveries in Atapuerca, similar to that of the 1990s. In the words of Eudald Carbonell, it is possible that “a virtuous cycle will occur until 2024 with fossils from two or three deposits”. And it will be precisely that year when the generational change in the co-direction of the project will take place: José Mª Bermúdez de Castro, Juan Luis Arsuaga and Carbonell himself will retire to make way for María Martinón-Torres, Nacho Martínez and Marina Mosquera.

The co-directors also point out that the oldest thing you find isn't always the most important. Or the fact that some more hominid fossils are specifically found. There are many other findings and data that give a context to the other more mediatic discoveries, but that are equally valuable. Juan Luis Arsuaga gave as an example that this same summer a doctoral thesis on the evolution of ceramics was going to be read in El Portalón. Things that on paper may not be so mediatic, but that at the research level are very important and even transcendental to know the uses and customs of the inhabitants or utensils found on the site.

With this new boost of financing and support for the project, for archaeologists and researchers who spend a large part of their working day inside a cave, the metaphor works the other way around: “we begin to see the light at the beginning of the tunnel”. Probably and progressively, the usual number of people working in the deposits will be recovered. In the meantime, we will have to trust science, which is once again proving essential for us to return to life as we knew it before March 2020.