Atapuerca

The Sierra de Atapuerca, a low limestone range near Burgos in northern Spain, contains one of the richest and longest fossil records of human evolution anywhere in the world, spanning over a million years of continuous habitation. In 1994, excavators at the Gran Dolina site uncovered remains dated to around 800,000–900,000 years old and assigned to Homo antecessor, at the time the oldest hominin fossils found in Western Europe, alongside cut-marked bones suggesting cannibalism — interpreted by researchers either as nutritional cannibalism during periods of scarcity or as a form of territorial signalling against rival groups.

Deeper within the cave system lies the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones"), a 13-metre vertical shaft at the bottom of which excavators since the 1980s have recovered the remains of at least 28 individuals of an early form of Homo heidelbergensis, dated to around 430,000 years ago — the largest collection of Middle Pleistocene human fossils anywhere. The remains show no signs of having fallen accidentally or been carried by water, leading the excavation team to propose that the bodies were deliberately placed there by other humans, possibly the earliest known example of funerary behaviour — a claim reinforced by the discovery, among the bones, of a single finely made pink quartzite hand axe, nicknamed "Excalibur," that shows no signs of use and may have been placed as a grave offering.