The Atapuerca Mountains

Low karst hills near the village of Atapuerca in the province of Burgos, full of caves that have given up the earliest known people in Western Europe. An excavation that is still going on has found fossil deposits and stone tools left by communities of Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, who used these hills as a favoured place to live through a long stretch of the Lower Palaeolithic; the earliest specimen reliably dated is between 1.2 million and 630,000 years old. The hills stand beside the Bureba corridor, the pass between the Ebro valley and the Duero basin, which carried a Roman road and the pilgrim route to Santiago and now carries the N-1 and the AP-1, and that position is thought to be part of why people kept coming back. The digs have even turned up a new genus of shrew. Some of the finds are shown in the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, and 15 percent of the working people of the village now have jobs in tourism.