Revealing himself as a hidden treasure worthy of Indiana Jones, This Tuesday it was presented at the Museum of Archeology of Catalonia (MAC)in Barcelona, the identification of 54 Neanderthal remains that correspond to at least three individuals who They lived more than 50,000 years ago in Cova Simanyain it Sant Llorenç del Munt and l’Obac Natural Park. According to the archaeologists responsible for the project, it is the most important collection of Neanderthal remains in Catalonia and one of the most relevant in the Iberian Peninsula.
like the lost ark
Of the 54 remains, belonging to an adult, probably a woman which measured about 154 centimeters, at a preteen of about 11 or 12 years old and a child between 7 and 8 years old, Only one has been found in the cave excavation since 2020. The other 53, “as if it were the Lost Ark,” the professor of Prehistory has joked Josep Maria Fullola, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), remained preserved in a box kept in a warehouse in Cervera, where everything that does not fit in the funds of the MAC, directed by Jusèp Boya, is sent. The contents of the box came from a clandestine excavation made by a pirate fan in the 70s in Cova Simanya, but since it was out of context, its importance was unknown, much less that they were Neanderthals.
Pressure from the Department of Culture of the Generalitat made this amateur end up handing over the box and its contents in the mid-80s and telling where and how he excavated it. “We knew that there were bones and tools in Simanya but we were not looking for Neanderthal remains at all,” says Fullola, whose team has been working since 2020 in the cave, where the connection with the box was found. “It’s a small tooth, a 12-year-old’s wisdom tooth. Anatomically it’s not the most important piece, but it allowed us to connect it with two other teeth also kept in the box,” he explains. Juan Ignacio Morales, researcher from IPHES-CERCA and the University of Barcelona, co-director of the excavation together with the archaeologists Antonio Rosasfrom the CSIC and the National Museum of Natural Sciences, and Artur Cebriàwho noticed the clue that connected the box to the cave.
“The excavation of Cova Simanya since 2020 has revealed that During the Paleolithic it was occasionally used as a sporadic camp by Neanderthals.. There is evidence of fires and domestic activities, stone tools and the animals they consumed, but also that it was used as shelter and burrow by large carnivoreslike the brown bear or the cave bear,” says Morales.
dark and narrow area
The cave has some 300 meters of travel spread across several galleries, with easy access. But the remains, the researcher adds, were in a small 20-meter branch, towards the end, “in a dark, narrow and deep area 70 meters from the entrance,” which perhaps helped its conservation.
Are they related?
Although the morphological study has been conclusive and unequivocally proves that they are Neanderthals, the analyzes of ancient DNA have been unsuccessful. “It could not be extracted because it has not been preserved,” laments Rosas. For this reason, he adds, it cannot be determined, for example, if they were mother and children. “But we can take archaeological poetic license and speculate with it, due to the fact that they appear in the same context and due to their ages,” he says with a smile.
The adult is the best represented individual, with elements of the jaw, two arms, a fairly complete hand and several teeth, although some cannot be ruled out as being from a fourth individual.
The study will try to specify the diet and physical characteristics of the individuals
These results, which are published the magazine ‘Frontiers in Earth Science’will not be the only ones, predict the researchers, who still cannot determine what they died of not even if it was a burial (This, Fullola emphasizes, would probably have been possible if the remains had been studied at the same place where they were found by professionals and not by an amateur who took them out of context).
Specify the dating
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In addition, they will continue to reconstruct the history of the site, they will try to specify the physical characteristics of the individuals, their diet (with the help of tartar deposits from their teeth) and refine their age, since for now, the first dating only ensures that they are before 50,000 years, which is as far as the proof of the Carbon-14. They will also try to understand the growth pattern of Neanderthals compared to that of our species, Homo Sapiens, by studying the young man’s tooth, but also the child’s first vertebra.
For now, what has been found allows, with phylogeography, explains Rosas“study the population dynamics and evolutionary deployment of Neanderthals in the territories they occupied. Simanya can show how this group was genetically and culturally related to others in Catalonia”, an area that was part of a corridor of populations that links with those of the Levant, the Cantabrian and Atapuerca, in the center of the Peninsula.