San Sebastián (EFE).- The recent complaint by some caving enthusiasts about possible effects of the works of the High Speed Train (TAV) to the Lezetxiki cave has put the focus on this Basque archaeological enclave, a benchmark of the time Neanderthal in the peninsula, unknown to the general public.
At the beginning of last month, some images that showed the roof of a tunnel through a hole in the wall of a gallery in Lezetxiki raised the alarm to Congress, where the Minister of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez, calmed the waters when affirming the deposit itself had not suffered “any damage”.
Now, once the absence of affections at this point has been verified, the professor of Prehistory of the University of the Basque Country Álvaro Arrizabalaga explains, in statements to EFE, the importance of this site, declared a Cultural Asset of Special Protection with the category of Archaeological Zone , whose excavations he has directed in recent years.
Homo Eidelbergensis
Located in the Gipuzkoan town of Arrasate, among its strata was discovered “the oldest human bone remains in the Basque paleoanthropological record”, a humerus, probably from a Homo Heidelbergensis woman, with a minimum age of about 164,000 years, and two very probably of Neanderthal origin, in addition to thousands of remains of prehistoric lithic industry.
As Arrizabalaga reveals, Lezetxiki also accumulates innumerable vestiges of prehistoric fauna, many of which are “first records” of species on the peninsula, among which we find remains of wolverines, marmots and birch mice, as well as the last macaque that inhabited the our territory, among other curiosities such as some shells that would have served as “ornaments” to the last Neanderthals.
Lezetxiki is also a “historic” site for peninsular archaeology, since its first excavation campaigns began in 1956 under the direction of José Miguel Barandiaran and until 1969 they were the field school for a whole generation of prehistorians.
Subsequently, both Álvaro Arrizabalaga and the UPV/EHU professor and Ikerbaske researcher María José Iriarte have been the ones who, since 1996, have worked on the most recent scientific excavations at Lezetxiki.
historiographical value
“The cave has a historiographical value in itself”, details Arrizabalaga. “It is a site that will soon be a century since it was discovered and that has been excavated for very long periods by different teams that have been attended by generations of archaeologists from different sites and have made it work as a kind of school field,” he explains.
“In this way, it has become a referential value” on the peninsula, insists the professor, because Lezetxiki “always appears on all the maps and manuals that talk about the Neanderthals” and their “Mousterian” industry, “even when you go to Germany or France.
As if that were not enough, the cave has human remains, something that “at street level” makes “everyone interested”. Some vestiges that are also of “particular” relevance due to the two moments to which they belong, since the humerus is temporarily located “between the species prior to the Neanderthals and the Neanderthals themselves”, and the molars “between these and our own species ”.
Timeline
For this reason, Lezetxiki allows “an interesting account of a time line at the end of which we are” and that contributes “a lot” to the importance of the site, says Arrizabalaga.
Likewise, it highlights the “explanatory value” of this cavern, which serves to give context to other sites in the environment and helps confirm that the location of all of them is not “arbitrary”, but that they are articulated around a kind of “highway prehistoric” that communicated the Iberian Peninsula with the rest of Europe through the passage of the Bidasoa river.
A route that, in what is currently the Basque Country, drew a very marked “T” “penetrating towards the Ebro valley” and “multiplying by three or four the area of archaeological value compared to what we had a few decades ago” , when “nobody was looking at anything other than what was happening in the coastal territories”, describes the expert.
archaeological record
One last “undeniable” value of Lezetxiki lies, in his opinion, in the existence of “an archaeological record of human occupations of different species” relatively continuous over 200,000 years.
Something that has recently been verified after having overcome “many technical problems to date the site” and “knowing the chronology of each of its levels with a fair approximation,” the expert details.
Currently, the work in Lezetxiki continues with “many control visits” and “some small sampling”, with the great challenge for the future of trying to “recover human DNA in the sediment itself” in a project that is still on “stand by”. ” but that it will be done “sooner rather than later”, Arrizabalaga advances.