It takes a special kind of detective work to figure out the story of how we became human. This episode takes us to a unique fossil site in Spain where scientists go back through time - finding clues in a rich fossil record that stretches over hundreds and thousands of years. They are uncovering a story with twists and turns that are more dramatic and mysterious than an Agatha Christie novel.
It takes a special kind of detective work to figure out the story of how we became human. This episode takes us to a unique fossil site in Spain where scientists go back through time - finding clues in a rich fossil record that stretches over hundreds and thousands of years. They are uncovering a story with twists and turns that are more dramatic and mysterious than an Agatha Christie novel.
Further reading (and listening)
About The Leakey Foundation
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The Foundation was established in 1968 to fund work at the forefront of fossil and primate studies and provide opportunities for a global community of scientists. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins
In 50 lively and up-to-the-minute essays illustrated with full-color photographs, Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins presents stories of the most exciting and groundbreaking surprises revealed by human origins research.
Prepared in consultation with leading experts and written by Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for NOVA, Discovering Us features stunning photographs, some taken at the actual moment that groundbreaking discoveries were made. The book presents a highly accessible account of the latest scientific insights into the ultimate question of humanity’s origins. Discovering Us was published by Signature Books.
Find Discovering Us at your local library, bookstore, or amazon.com.
Show Credits:
Discovering Us was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
Meredith Johnson:
This is Discovering Us from The Leakey Foundation and Signature Books … an audio companion to the book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins. Written by Evan Hadingham and read for you by Ashley Judd.
I’m your host, Meredith Johnson.
It takes a special kind of detective work to figure out the story of how we became human.
This installment takes us to a unique fossil site in Spain where scientists can essentially go back through time - finding clues in a rich fossil record that stretches over hundreds and thousands of years- Uncovering a story with twists and turns that are more dramatic and mysterious than an Agatha Christie novel.
Here’s Ashley Judd…
Ashley Judd:
The Pit of Bones
For young boys from the village of Ibeas de Juarros, in northern Spain, venturing into the nearby Sierra de Atapuerca used to be a traditional rite of passage.
Entering a limestone cavern called Cueva Mayor, the boys would walk, wriggle, and crawl for a third of a mile until they reached a 43-foot vertical shaft known as the Sima de los Huesos, or Pit of Bones.
Then they would clamber down the shaft to reach the Pit’s sloping floor, which led to a cramped, dead-end chamber.
There, in the clammy mud, they would dig up the teeth of extinct cave bears to take back to the village and impress their girlfriends.
Centuries of all this tooth hunting had so thoroughly churned up the mud that the Pit attracted little attention until a graduate student spotted a fossil human jaw there in 1976.
In the 1980s, a team of archaeologists began an investigation, which first required backpacking tons of wet clay out of the Pit.
Improbably, the tiny area of the dead-end chamber—no bigger than an average city parking space—turned out to conceal Europe’s single richest deposit of fossil humans.
Three decades of digging have yielded a trove of nearly 7,000 fossils representing at least 28 individuals.
They appear to belong to one population and they provide an unprecedented snap-shot of a single prehistoric people, who lived around 430,000 years ago.
Forensic study of the bones reveals these people to have been robust, suggesting physically demanding lives, with both sexes averaging a height of around 5 feet 6 inches.
Their brains were smaller than the modern average. Most of the bones belonged to teenagers; only three adults survived beyond the age of 30.
The Pit’s impressive array of 17 skulls—some of the most intact ever found in Europe—exhibit distinctive features such as thick brow ridges arching over each eye and rugged lower jaws with small molar teeth, all foreshadowing the characteristic appearance of the Neanderthals.
A similar conclusion springs from an extraordinary feat of DNA analysis, one of the oldest sequences yet retrieved from ancient human bone.
Based on samples from a tooth and a femur, geneticist Matthias Meyer laboriously reconstructed DNA fragments of only 20–30 base pairs or nucleotides at a time.
Eventually, he was able to piece together over 1 million base pairs. This was a tiny fraction of the 3 billion base pairs of the nuclear genome, yet it was enough to confirm a strong link between the Sima people and the Neanderthal lineage.
These “pre-Neanderthals” faced many health challenges. The best-preserved skull of all, nicknamed Miguelón by the archaeologists, belonged to a large male.
His heavily worn teeth suggested he had used them as a “third hand,” probably to grip hides while defleshing animals.
When a tooth broke, an infection spread into his upper jaw and up to his eye socket, likely leading to a painful death at age 35–40.
Another adult male, Agamemnón, was probably deaf from bony growths that invaded his ear canals.
But the most remarkable case was Benjamina, a little girl whose head was abnormally lopsided due to a condition in which a skull plate closes prematurely during infancy.
She undoubtedly suffered mental disability, yet she survived until the age of around nine.
The presence of these diseased and disadvantaged individuals strongly suggests a measure of social care and empathy among the prehistoric community at Atapuerca.
But could this sense of empathy have extended to a concern for the dead? The idea that the bodies were deliberately dropped into the Pit of Bones is controversial; even more so is the theory that this was a ritual act of intentional, rather than casual, disposal.
Yet after decades of study, the archaeologists have examined every possibility and one by one eliminated other plausible explanations for how the bodies could have found their way into the Pit.
Clearly, some had died from fatal disease before their bones ended up there. No evidence exists that they were transported there by water or other natural means. Nor was the Pit a carnivore den, although bears, lions, and foxes occasionally tumbled into the shaft.
The tiny chamber was not a living site, as no tools have been found with the bodies, with one tantalizing exception. The sole artifact found in the Pit is a stone hand axe, crafted of beautiful and unusual pink quartzite, which the team named “Excalibur” after King Arthur’s legendary sword.
María Martinón-Torres, one of the Atapuerca paleoanthropologists and a Leakey Foundation grantee says it was made from a raw material that was quite special and the tool has no traces of ever being used.
After analyzing all the possibilities, researchers think the pit of bones may be one of the earliest examples of an intentional accumulation or disposal of bodies, with this very enigmatic hand axe deposited with them.
She says this could be one of the first instances of a funerary practice. One that researchers will continue to explore.
[MUSIC rises and then ducks under closing credits]
Meredith Johnson:
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins was written for The Leakey Foundation by Evan Hadingham. It was published by Signature Books. The stories are read for you by Ashley Judd.
All the episodes of this audio companion are available to listen to right now! Make sure to subscribe and share this series with a friend.
You can buy a copy of Discovering Us at your local bookstore or wherever you buy books. There’s a link in the shownotes.
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The science you heard about today was made possible by Leakey Foundation supporters. Visit our website to learn how you can get involved. Go to leakeyfoundation.org. That’s l-e-a-k-e-y foundation dot org.
This project was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation