Sima de las Palomas

Sima de las Palomas
Region	Region of Murcia
Coordinates	37°47′59″N0°53′45″W / 37.79972°N 0.89583°W
Altitude	123 m (404 ft)
Type	Intermittent settlement
History
Periods	Middle Paleolithic
Site notes
Excavation dates	1992-

Last updated September 13, 2022

Sima de las Palomas ("Rock-Dove hole") is on Cabezo Gordo, located between Balsicas and San Javier in the Murcia region of Spain. It was inhabited for tens of thousands of years, by Neanderthals and others. The shaft was filled in with brecciated material in the Late Pleistocene, and was partly excavated by miners in the nineteenth century. In the rubble, fossil remains of humans, including those of Neanderthals, were found in the 1990s,^[1] and after excavations in the shaft, in 2006-2007 a skeleton of a young Neanderthal woman was found,^[2]^[3] possibly buried with her child.

Description

The cave is in Torre-Pacheco, in the Region of Murcia. It is a vertical shaft in karst, in the Cabezo Gordo hill, and overlooks Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean. The cave is found under overhanging rock, 123 meters above sea level, and the shaft has a depth of 18 meters. It was filled with brecciated material in the Late Pleistocene, much of which was removed by 19th-century miners^[1] who dug a horizontal tunnel toward the shaft, excavated much of it and left the rubble remains on the hillside.^[4] The miners were probably looking for water to wash out iron ore for the mining concessions on the hill.^[5])

Archeological investigation started when remains of an individual now called Palomas 1 were found in the rubble;^[1] someone had abseiled into the shaft and found a fossil in the sediment a few meters down. It turned out to be the jaws of a Neanderthal, still together, and an important enough find to warrant scientific investigation. The researchers soon discovered that much of the shaft had been dug out and the remains dumped on the hillside; the miners had left an entire column of brecciated Pleistocene material, on the other side of the now 3-meter wide shaft. Excavation necessitated the building of scaffolding from the bottom of the shaft. The presence of nesting rock doves at the time of the investigation gave the shaft its name.^[5] Between 1992 and 1999, rubble from the mine was investigated, and after 1994 the shaft itself was investigated; those investigations continue today,^[1] under the auspices of the Murcian Association for the Study of Palaeoanthropology and the Quaternary.^[6]

Archeological finds

There are three main sites for archeological remains: the rubble left by mining, which are difficult to date and lack context; a "lens" of brecciated éboulis with remains over 50,000 years old; and the layers excavated inside the shaft, with remains of around 40,000 years old.^[1] The remains of around 100 human fossils were found,^[2] and some of them suggest they may have been buried.^[7]

According to the authors of the 2008 study "Late Neandertals in Southeastern Iberia: Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, Murcia, Spain", the findings confirm the late occurrence of Neanderthals on the Iberian peninsula, and "suggest microevolutionary processes and/or population contact with contemporaneous modern humans to the north". Morphological variation in the remains falls outside of the expected range of variation among Neanderthals, and "this pattern may be result of genetic drift in relative isolation, directional change or, perhaps more likely, population contact to the north".^[1]

Palomas 96

An individual called Palomas 96, a young Neanderthal woman discovered in 2006-2007, shows properties of both European Neanderthals (in face, teeth, limbs, and body proportions, but her "locomotor hypertrophy" resembles that of humans of the Late Pleistocene.^[2] She was short compared to other Neanderthals.^[7]

Palomas 96 (nicknamed "Paloma" by the researchers) was found 85% complete; underneath her was Palomas 97, a child, tentatively referred to as hers. Palomas 96 was found with her elbows bent and her hands touching her forehead, like Palomas 97. The bodies were in this position before rigor mortis had set in, suggesting burial.^[8]

Related Research Articles

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Erik Trinkaus is a paleoanthropologist specializing in Neandertal and early modern human biology and human evolution. Trinkaus researches the evolution of the species Homo sapiens and recent human diversity, focusing on the paleoanthropology and emergence of late archaic and early modern humans, and the subsequent evolution of anatomically modern humanity. Trinkaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor Emeritus of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS One, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and the Journal of Human Evolution and has written/co-written or edited/co-edited fifteen books in paleoanthropology. He is frequently quoted in the popular media.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neanderthal anatomy</span> Anatomical composition of the Neanderthal body

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References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Walker, Michael J.; Gibert, Josep; López, Mariano V.; Lombardi, A. Vincent; Pérez-Pérez, Alejandro; Zapata, Josefina; Ortega, Jon; Higham, Thomas; Pike, Alistair; Schwenninger, Jean-Luc; Zilhão, João; Trinkaus, Erik (2008). "Late Neandertals in Southeastern Iberia: Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, Murcia, Spain". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . 105 (52): 20631–20636. Bibcode:2008PNAS..10520631W. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811213106 . PMC 2634956 . PMID 19074275.
1 2 3 Walker, Michael J.; Ortega, Jon; Parmová, Klara; López, Mariano V.; Trinkaus, Erik (2011). "Morphology, body proportions, and postcranial hypertrophy of a female Neandertal from the Sima de las Palomas, southeastern Spain" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . 108 (25): 10087–10091. Bibcode:2011PNAS..10810087W. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1107318108 . PMC 3121844 . PMID 21646528 . Retrieved 13 September 2020.
↑ Rincon, Paul (18 February 2020). "Neanderthal 'skeleton' is first found in a decade". BBC News . Retrieved 13 September 2020.
↑ "Formation of Sima de las Palomas". Asociación Murciana para el Estudio de la Paleoantropología y el Cuaternario. 2020. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
1 2 "The story of our field research at Sima de las Palomas". Asociación Murciana para el Estudio de la Paleoantropología y el Cuaternario. 2020. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
↑ "Who We Are". Asociación Murciana para el Estudio de la Paleoantropología y el Cuaternario. 2020. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
1 2 Lillios, Katina T. (2019). The Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula: From the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age. Cambridge University Press. pp. 54–55, 72. ISBN 9781108764209.
↑ Walker, Michael (5 June 2014). "The Neanderthals of Sima de las Palomas". Popular Archaeology. Retrieved 16 September 2020.