The Pit of the Bones
Twenty-eight individuals at the bottom of a Spanish shaft, and the oldest hominin nuclear DNA yet recovered.
- When
- Known to
- ± 15 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Sima de los Huesos is reached through a 13-metre vertical shaft deep inside the Atapuerca cave system, and it contains the remains of at least 28 individuals dated to about 430,000 years ago — the largest Middle Pleistocene human assemblage in the world. There is no sign they lived there and no carnivore accumulation, so deliberate deposition of the dead is the leading interpretation. A single beautifully made quartzite handaxe, nicknamed Excalibur, was found among them and may have been placed there.