Neanderthals at Prado Vargas:- The geologist Alfonso Benito Calvo, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is one of the codirectors of the ninth excavation campaign at the Neanderthal site of Prado Vargas, a cave in the Ojo Guareña karst complex, in the north of the province of Burgos, where more than two thousand remains of fauna and stone tools were recovered in the month of August.
Specifically, the thirty square meters excavated this year from Level 4 (46,000 years old) yielded teeth and bone fragments from cave bear (Ursus speleaeus), wild boar (Sus scrofa), horse (Equus ferus) and red deer (Cervus elaphus) were found, as well as numerous flint and quartzite tools, among which the highlights are racloirs and rough-edged flakes.
The main novelty for this campaign is the recovery of a hearth, which was raised en bloc for more detailed processing and study in the laboratory. Analysis of the ashes, charcoal and scorched sediments and materials will reveal which species of trees were in the landscape, the temperature the fire reached, its structure, and when the hearth was used.
The second major finding was of eight coprolites (fossilized feces) from cave bear, which will offer information about these animals' diet and genetic makeup. Analyzing these will also allow us to see which fruit and plants were among the biotic resources of the zone 46,000 years ago, and which might therefore have been gathered by the Neanderthals who occupied Cueva de Prado Vargas.
Neanderthal occupation
This year's excavation has evinced the existence of different sublevels within Level 4, showing that the cave was occupied by various Neanderthal generations, who used the cavity as their fireplace for hundreds or thousands of years.
“We have collected samples of charcoal and bones from the different sublevels for dating and so that we can see exactly how much time elapsed between the different occupations,” comment the three codirectors of Prado Vargas: Alfonso Benito Calvo, Marta Navazo Ruiz (Universidad de Burgos), and Rodrigo Alonso Alcalde (Museo de la Evolución Humana and Universidad de Burgos).
Including this ninth campaign, more than 15,000 remains have been recovered which, as the codirectors also explain, make Prado Vargas a key place in our scientific understanding of how the last Neanderthals to occupy this part of the Iberian Peninsula lived. The most important of these pieces is a deciduous molar from an eight-year-old Neanderthal girl dubbed Vera: to date this is the most ancient human remains discovered in the Ojo Guareña karst complex. AlphaGalileo/SP
