In 1972, the Edelweiss Speleological Group, pioneers in finding the first remains in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos), found a sealed gallery near the famous Cueva Mayor, probably after a natural collapse about 3,000 years ago. That fact caused what was inside to remain as a kind of 'time capsule' that testifies to how the first farmers and ranchers in the area lived there millennia ago. In what was baptized as the Flint Gallery - because it contains a deposit of said rock - thousands of ceramic remains, tools, water storage and retention structures, engravings, paintings, animal remains and human remains have been found. All of this clues about how those primitive people lived there between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago, in societies with a culture and customs much more complex than one might think despite their prehistoric 'surname'. Related News standard No A 4,000-year cold wave wiped out the first settlers in southern Europe Patricia Biosca International paleoclimate experts, including Spanish researchers, have found evidence of a severe glaciation 1.12 million years ago that caused the depopulation of our continent Now, a new study published in the journal 'Quaternary Science Reviews' further supports this hypothesis: tombs have been found separate from the place where they carried out their daily lives, distinguishing between life and death. Even some with what appears to be funerary trousseau. Because, according to the authors, those natural recesses functioned as a 'cemetery' from the early Neolithic to the Bronze Age. A time capsule The Sílex Gallery has about 500 meters of length (although with the surrounding spaces it adds up to more than 900 meters) and is divided into five parts: a first room and sectors A, B, C and D. In different campaigns Between the seventies and eighties, evidence of numerous camps and remains of torches were found; more than 6,000 ceramic fragments (belonging to a minimum of 336 vessels), dozens of tools (including a polished axe) and multiple remains of fauna (especially sheep, goats, hares and rabbits). More than 2,700 human remains were also collected in different areas, most of them on the surface. Map of the Flint Gallery showing the location of the First Room, Sectors A to D, Sima A and Sima B. The small dots in sectors A and B show the spatial position of the human remains recovered on the surface. Note the great spatial separation between these human remains and those recovered in Sima A and Sima B JM Apellániz, S. Domingo All of these bones were attributed at the time to the Bronze Age (about 3,000 years ago). However, at the bottom of the grotto, in two wells (named Sima A and Sima B) located 300 meters from the entrance to the gallery, five bodies were found. One of them, that of a girl of about 13 years old, contained ceramic vessels that, when later dated, revealed a surprise: they dated about 6,000 years ago, three millennia before the Bronze Age. This inconsistency motivated the team led by archaeologist Antonio Molina-Almansa, from the University of Alcalá (UAH), to reanalyze the two sets of human remains. And, eureka: radiocarbon dating of teeth and bones of three of the five individuals has revealed that those people (the girl buried with the vessels in Sima A and an adult man and woman found in Sima B) lived somewhere moment between 5307 and 4897 BC. C., which places them in the early Neolithic period, which began 7,000 years ago. Among the bones, there would also be those of another person from the Bronze Age and a fifth whose origin could not be dated due to the few remains found. The authors admit that some of those remains could have fallen there accidentally (it would not be the first time that bodies of people who fell into the chasms thousands of years ago have been found); but they point out that the fact that the vessels with the smaller one were found coinciding with both dates, in addition to their location at the end of the gallery, added to the fact that some of the thousands of bones found in the gallery still need to be analyzed, could reveal new surprises and further support this thesis. "The remains from the Bronze Age seem to correspond to an accident involving an individual who was wandering through the cave," explains Mercedes Conde Valverde, assistant professor at the University of Alcalá, director of the Chair of Evolutionary Otoacoustics (HM Hospitales) to ABC. UAH) and one of the authors of the study. "However, there are other remains from the Bronze Age in other areas of the Flint Gallery that are being studied at this time and that will allow us to know if they are also intentional burials." A unique burial The human remains discovered in Lower Neolithic sites in the Iberian Peninsula are not abundant and are found in different contexts: caves, rock shelters and open-air sites. In fact, depending on the area, there are different trends: on the coasts, both Mediterranean and Atlantic, they have been found in caves; However, in the interior regions, the majority are in open-air burials (although they would have numerous caves around them, as in the Ebro River basin). As a fact: there are only two caves with human remains from the Early Neolithic in the interior of the peninsula, specifically in Els Trocs and Chaves, both in Huesca. "In both caves, human remains appeared in domestic contexts, suggesting that there was no special place reserved for the burial of their dead," the authors note. That is to say, the remains were there, but an 'ex professed' ritual had not been carried out away from their daily lives: life and death were not separated. MORE INFORMATION news Yes 'Diamond fountains' that emerge from the depths of the Earth news No They slow down time 100,000 million times thanks to a quantum computer For all these reasons, the Flint Gallery is a special place, to say the least. "It is an unusual situation, both in Spain and in the rest of Europe," says Conde Valverde, who emphasizes that it is an "exceptional" site, especially when compared to other sites of similar age in the Sierra de Atapuerca (El Portalón and the Mirador). "We are currently continuing with the investigations of another set of human remains found in the gallery and we hope to make them known next year," he says. Atapuerca, then, never stops revealing surprises from our past.
