Burgos (EFE) named Pink, found last summer.
The objective of the Atapuerca researchers is to continue excavating the area from which the cheekbone and upper jaw emerged, dating back 1.3 or 1.4 million years, explained the coordinator of the Sima del Elefante site, Rosa Huguet, to the media in a visit to the Burgos sites.
The desire is to be able to find new bones that complete the face of the first European, both the face and the skull or even the skeleton.
“At the moment there is nothing,” Huguet said, mainly because they have not started working on the “package” that housed the scientific finding.
Since the excavations began in mid-June, the work in the Sima del Elefante has focused on closing level TE7, before continuing down and approaching TE6, which they have already reached “by accident”.
In the area where ‘Pink’ appeared, it has been cleaned, but an attempt has been made to excavate applying archaeological methodology, that is, to work the entire level and not just the specific point where the face appeared.
They will get to it “in the next few days” and Huguet has not ruled out finding more human remains, since he has admitted that “anything can happen.”
On paper, these types of finds in the Sima del Elefante are “very coincidental”, because “everything they have here is in a secondary position”.
The coordinator of the site has recalled that the elements that have been recovered, whether animal fossils or lithic industry, have arrived “dragged” from abroad, in a process of entry by runoff.
The situation of Sima del Elefante is not the same, for example, as Gran Dolina, where at level TD6 it is expected to find more human remains of Homo antecessor since there was a camp.
They knew that human remains could appear because the animal bones that have been recovered had cut marks, which indicates human processing, but they have no further certainty.
Even so, Rosa Huguet does not lose hope of being able to find, for example, teeth from the maxilla recovered last summer or other types of remains, since “the area has yet to be excavated.”
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With the usual work, and without focusing the foci, the researchers of Galería continue, the site of the Trinchera del Ferrocarril that was used as a place to obtain animals.
It functioned as a natural trap, into which animals that roamed the mountains fell, recalled Isabel Cáceres, co-director of the site, so what it contains are animal challenges.
Also remains of the lithic industry, the tools used to process the meat that would later be consumed in camps such as the one in Gran Dolina, and the evidence of the tasks of fine-tuning them.
The interest of this Atapuerca site, which has five stratigraphic units from 200,000 to 400,000 years old, is the evidence of the subsistence strategies of the ancient inhabitants of Atapuerca. EFE