Spanish ‘Pit of the Bones’ yields 17 remarkable early human skulls

http://www.todayonline.com/daily-focus/science/spanish-pit-bones-yields-17-remarkable-early-human-skulls

WASHINGTON — The name of the cave may sound bleak — Sima de los Huesos, Spanish for “Pit of the Bones” — but the site in northern Spain’s Atapuerca mountain range is providing a wondrous peek into a remote period in the history of early humans.

Scientists yesterday (June 19) described an astonishing collection of 17 fossil skulls unearthed in the cave dating from about 430,000 years ago of an extinct human species closely related to the Neanderthals who later prospered across Europe and Asia from roughly 250,000 to 40,000 years ago.

The skulls, reassembled from jumbled fragments from a small chamber deep within the cave, are the oldest known fossils to show clear Neanderthal features in the skull, although the scientists stopped short of calling them actual Neanderthals.

“Never before had such a tremendous collection of hominin (extinct human) skulls been discovered at a single site. For the first time in history we can study a fossil population, not isolated fossils,” said palaeontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, who led the study published in the journal Science.

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