For many years, the Cave of the Malalmuerzo (“bad lunch”) near Granada, Spain, located near rocky farmland, stood open to the public. Local residents stooped under the low ceiling and wound their way through stalactites, and some made the belly-crawl to the deeper reaches of the cave and the early paintings there.
They took home “some artifact […] ceramics, bits of bone, etc.,” writes a local businessman. In 1983, the first archaeologists showed up, but the souvenir-hunting continued until local authorities closed Malalmuerzo, now an important site for studying early humans.
A new paper led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports the finding there of 23,000-year-old human teeth – the remains of a person who would have lived during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), making them the first of their kind.
Archaeologists have long studied how early Europeans weathered the coldest period of the last Ice Age, ...
