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NEW NEANDERTHAL
FOSSILS FROM THE IBERIAN PENINSULA: SIDRON CAVE
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| On March 23rd 1994, four sport speleologists
found in a secondary gallery of Sidrón cave, in the Asturian county
of Piloña (Northern Spain), two human mandibular remains that they
attributed to casualties of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Under this
assumption, the Spanish Guardia Civil (national police agency) carried out
a forensic recovery following a judicial procedure. More than a hundred
bones were collected and delivered to the Forensic Anatomic Institute of
Madrid for comprehensive analysis. Dr J. Prieto, Head of the Forensic Anthropology
Laboratory, concluded there that the bones did not belong to modern humans
but to representatives of the Neanderthal clade. Later on, by the end of
1998, the fossils underwent two further assessment analyses by Dr. M.D.
Garralda and Dr. B. Vandermeersch, on one side, and Dr. E. Aguirre and Dr.
A. Rosas, on the other. Although the two teams offered dissimilar taxonomic
interpretations of the sample, both of them strongly agreed on its major
importance.
In the Spring of 1999, the fossils were submitted to Prof. J. E. Egocheaga, Head of the Physical Anthropology Laboratory of the University of Oviedo, for comprehensive paleoanthropological study. The first results were made public through three reports presented at the XI Congress of the Spanish Society of Biological Anthropology (SEAB), held in Santiago de Compostela in September 1999. Three new reports were presented in the XII Congress of the Society, held in July 2001 in Barcelona. From an academic point of view, the project for the analysis of these remains has produced two "tesis de licenciatura" (equivalent to First Degree dissertations) and a research seminar (equivalent to MS), as wel1 as several publications and conference contributions. All skeletal parts are represented in the Sidrón assemblage. Among the specimens, some of them secondarily fragmented due to their irregular extraction, they were found an almost complete mandible, a left hemimandible, several additional isolated teeth, an hyoid body, and many hind and lower limb bones, ribs and vertebrae. The different studies carried out until present al1ow to assess the presence of a newborn, an infant, a juvenile, and two adults. Surely, al1 of them can be related to the heildebergensis-neanderthalensis phyletic lineage. Their morphology agrees with the model of early Neanderthals, such as Krapina (Croatia). Rosas and Aguirre have also identified in the mandibles a certain degree of similarity with Krapina 2, as well as with the fossils of L´Arago II and Atapuerca-SH. The comparison of the Sidron remains with the Atapuerca-SH sample, and the revisions of Bermúdez de Castro and Arsuaga also support this taxonomic diagnostic. The arqueological excavation of the bed during the summers of 2000 and 2001, under the direction of Prof. J. Fortea, Head of the Archaeological Area of the History Department of the University of Oviedo, allowed the recovery of more than 200 new hominid bones and what seems to be associated fauna, still in phase of revision, as well as some early mousterian lithic industry.
IN ORDER TO READ THE ABSTRACTS OF SOME OF THE PAPERS PUBLISHED IN SPANISH, PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW:
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