The field work campaign at the deposits of ANY (Granada), with the oldest human remains in Western Europe, has allowed the location of numerous remains of animals such as the sabre-toothed tiger, the bear or the mammothsuch as stone tools carved by humans.
The director of the Orce project and coordinator of the works, archaeologist Juan Manuel Jiménez Arenas, said on Thursday that the results obtained in this campaign can be considered the most spectacular in recent years.
He did it as a balance of the end of some works in which The large number of remains of carnivores and proboscideans stands out, some ancient elephants, as well as the quality of the carved stone tools made by the humans of that time.
The delegate for Tourism, Culture and Sport, Fernando Egea, He has announced that the fauna and stone tools will allow progress in the investigation of why Orce was a nerve centre for the first settlers of the European continent.
Jiménez Arenas has predicted that the study of all the findings will offer a year full of surprises, especially focused on understanding how more distant ancestors related to their environment and to each other.
Work at the deposit of Mycenae Saleled by José Yravedra, from the Complutense University of Madrid, and Jiménez Arenas, from the University of Granada, has kept a 3D diary of the site consisting of image capture and a georeferenced virtual reconstruction at the end of each work day to document and evaluate the excavation process.
Among all the elements recovered in this area, two bones from the leg of a Megantereon stand out, a sabre-toothed tiger that inhabited the lands of Orce 1.6 million years ago, two giant deer antlers, a mammoth scapula from a large individual and remains of bison and canid.
In the excavation in Leon Ravinewhere the oldest human milk tooth in Europe was found, tools made by early Europeans have been found, including a large flake carved from high-quality flint with a worked edge in its central part.
This is what in the world of archaeology is called a denticulate, a tool traditionally associated with woodworking, found next to a large stone worked in quartz, a raw material unseen in Orce until 2024, used for crushing or grinding.
To the more than A thousand fragments of bones and teeth from large mammals There are also parts of a turtle shell and human tools carved in stone, a leg bone from an ancestor of goats and a mammoth molar.
In New Source 3, the youngest site with 1.2 million years antiquity, a spectacular humerus of a small but adult mammoth has been unearthed.
On the other hand, one of the most amazing fossils has been a molar of Mammuthus meridionalis from an individual less than a year old, which stands out for its small size that contrasts with its great importance due to its scarcity in the record.
In terms of human activity, a large limestone tool has been found with a worked edge that gives the piece a hypnotic symmetry, and a large flake that was used, then turned into a core and finally recycled.
Source: www.vozpopuli.com
