Atapuerca
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How it came to be
In the Atapuerca hills near Burgos in northern Spain, deep cuttings for a 20th-century railway through the limestone exposed cave deposits such as Gran Dolina and the Sima de los Huesos. The railway was unprofitable and did not run for long.
Excavations in 1964 under Francisco Jordá Cerdá found human tools and fossils. From 1978 work was led by Emiliano Aguirre, and later jointly by Eudald Carbonell, José María Bermúdez de Castro and Juan Luis Arsuaga.
Bone fragments from Gran Dolina, about 800,000 years old, are the oldest known evidence of humans in western Europe. The caves hold traces of people from nearly a million years ago into the Common Era. The site was inscribed in 2000.
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