The story of this place
In the low hills near Burgos, quarrying for a railway in the 19th century sliced through caves packed with the deepest human record in Europe. Excavations from the 1970s revealed Homo antecessor, dated to around 800,000 years ago—among the oldest hominins in western Europe—and bones bearing cut-marks that hint at cannibalism. The Sima de los Huesos, the 'Pit of Bones,' has yielded thousands of fossils from at least 28 individuals of an early Neanderthal-lineage population, apparently deliberately deposited. Atapuerca rewrote the story of how and when humans first peopled Europe, earning the site a Nobel-scale place in prehistory and a World Heritage listing.