In Atapuerca, Spain, in the footsteps of the first Europeans

To explore the archaeological site of Atapuerca, near Burgos in northwestern Spain, is to follow in the footsteps of the first Europeans and their successors. This is where "Pink," the oldest known prehuman fossil in the western part of the Old Continent, was unearthed. Its discovery in the "Elephant's Pit" was announced in March. Its jaw fragment and zygomatic bone have been attributed to a previously unnamed species related to Homo erectus and dated to between 1.1 and 1.4 million years ago.

With Dean Pink, no fewer than four species of the human lineage succeeded one another on these reliefs and in the caves of Atapuerca: then there was Homo antecessor , various Neanderthals and finally Homo sapiens , our own species, arrived more recently from Africa, and which is therefore not descended from these old Europeans. The whole offers "a complete encyclopedia of humanity in Europe," rejoices there paleoanthropologist Maria Martinon-Torres. We have the entire family album, but also, which makes things even more interesting, enough to describe the fauna, the ecosystem, the climate, the culture."

On this July day, this doctor by training, director of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Cenieh) in Burgos, and co-director of the excavations at Atapuerca, guides us around the main sites. Atapuerca, "is like a vast Swiss cheese full of cavities whose sediments we excavate in search of remains," she summarizes. A Swiss cheese ripped open at the very end of the ^19th century to allow a railway line to pass through, opening a trench along which a string of caverns appeared. They would wait nearly another century to attract the attention of scientists.

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