Prehistoric child’s finger bone, bear tooth pendant, and more discovered in Spanish cave
Life at high altitude is unforgiving. Scarcity of air and atmosphere makes breathing and other bodily functions difficult, especially for humans. However, a cave located more than 7,000 feet above sea level in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, is forcing archaeologists to rethink how often our prehistoric ancestors used these heights.
A team has discovered a cave in Spain filled with hearths, jewelry and human remains, indicating that humans may have lived at this incredibly high altitude as long as 5,500 years ago. A child’s finger bone and a baby tooth discovered among the rock also mean this cave may have been a burial site. The cave and its findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers of Environmental Archeology.
For decades, archaeologists believed that high mountain environments like this were places that prehistoric communities only occasionally passed through. Cave 338 is located at 7,332 feet above sea level in the Núria Valley of Spain. The team excavated four distinct rock layers, the oldest dating back 6,000 years. The most recent layer was thin, indicating that it was not used frequently.
But levels two and three held many surprises. The team found 23 hearths, all containing fragments of crushed and burned green minerals. The green fragments resemble malachite, a copper-rich mineral. From these preliminary clues, the team suspects that Cave 338 was a high-altitude mining camp between 3,000 and 5,500 years ago.
“Many of these fragments are thermally altered, whereas other materials in the cave are not, clearly suggesting that fire played an important role in their processing and that there was deliberate intent behind this,” Dr. Julia Montes-Landa, co-author of the study and an archaeologist and archaeometallurgist at the University of Granada in Spain, said in a statement. “In other words, they weren’t burned by accident.”
The hearths also intersect, indicating that visitors to the cave reused it frequently. They are also distinct, showing that their visits were spaced by a good portion of time.
In the third rock layer, the team found a finger bone and a baby tooth belonging to at least one child who died around the age of 11. This could mean other human remains are buried deeper in the cave, but there is currently not enough evidence to determine the cause of death or whether the bone and tooth belong to the same child.
However, two pendants found in the second layer offered more information about possible remains. One of the pendants is made from a shell and the other from a brown bear tooth and dates from the second millennium BCE.
“The shell pendant is interesting because it has parallels with other sites in Catalonia, suggesting shared traditions or connections between different communities,” Dr. Carlos Tornero, study co-author and zooarchaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, said in a statement. “The bear tooth pendant is much less common. This could indicate something more specific or symbolic, possibly linked to the local environment.”
Even though Cave 338 was not a full-time residence, those who came here must have found their trips to the mountain valuable enough to return for thousands of years.
“We cannot say exactly how long people stayed each time, but the repeated use of space and the density of the remains suggest occupations of short to medium duration, but which were repeated again and again over long periods of time,” Torneo added.
The team still has many questions about how and when humans used the cave and hopes to get a definitive answer about the chemical composition of the mysterious green mineral during upcoming field work this summer.
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