A fossil phalanx confirms the existence of Neanderthals in Atapuerca
A fossil phalanx confirms the existence of Neanderthals in Atapuerca
The American Journal of Physical Anthropology has just published a study, led by Adrián Pablos, a researcher at the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) (Spain), which demonstrates the taxonomic affinity with Neanderthals of a foot phalanx found in the site of the Gallery of the Statues of the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos).
The chronology of the levels where the phalanx was recovered, some 100,000 years ago, places it as one of the oldest Neanderthal remains of the Iberian Peninsula.
The work reveals that it is the phalanx of a right little finger of an adult individual. His comparative anthropological analysis has been complicated because there is a small number of well identified phalanges in the fossil record of both Neandertals and early Homo sapiens.
This human fossil, called GE-1573, appeared in the excavation campaign of 2017 in a Mousterian context, the typical technology of the Neanderthals. In addition, several dating methods place the sediments at the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene, the epoch of this extinct population.
"The metric results show that it is a distal phalanx similar to the few existing Neandertals, and much more robust than the anatomically modern humans of the Upper Pleistocene, the so-called Cro-Magnons, which allows us to assign this phalanx to a Neanderthal "Says Adrián Pablos, who has had the collaboration of researchers from the Mixed Center UCM-ISCIII of Human Evolution and Behavior and the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU).
Phalange of the Neandertal foot found in Atapuerca. (Photo: Javier Trueba)
On the other hand, this finding confirms the site of the Gallery of Statues, which has been excavated since 2008, as the fifth site of the Sierra de Atapuerca with Pleistocene human fossils, and represents the first evidence of a Neanderthal fossil in context. stratigraphic of these burgaleses deposits.
"The fact that only distal phalanges of the little finger of the foot have been recovered in sites with burials or large accumulations of fossils leaves the door open to the hope of finding more Neanderthal human remains in future excavation campaigns in this and other sites of Atapuerca ", concludes Pablos. (Source: CENIEH)
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