We will not dwell on the Pit of Bones.
People who have been there have a lot to say about it: a place where 250,000 years ago, human beings dragged several dozen corpses of other human beings into a cave and--who knows why?--dumped them down a 46- foot shaft. With a dull thwack the corpses must have landed, the base of the shaft being a muddy slope; arms and legs flailing like rag dolls, they rolled and settled into a low chamber that is the true bottom of the pit--a chamber without exit. Later, bears looking to hibernate blundered into the shaft, and some of them survived the fall long enough to gnaw on the human remains. Foxes also took the tumble, as did a lion or two. Over many centuries, a rich layer of animal remains built up on top of the jumbled human ones--and then the original mouth of the cave closed somehow, leaving all the bones undisturbed for many millennia. The wet clay preserved them perfectly. Not until the Middle Ages, judging from graffiti in the cave, was the pit rediscovered by the lads from Ibeas de Juarros, a village just down the hill and across the wheat fields.
Ibeas and the hill--a line of low crests called the Sierra de Atapuerca--are in north central Spain, a few miles east of Burgos. They are not far from Pamplona, where young men to this day choose to be chased through the streets by angry bulls. In Ibeas the streets are more apt to be filled with sheep, and at some point the boys there took to proving their manhood by venturing into the Pit of Bones--the Sima de los Huesos. The idea was to fetch bear teeth for the girls. Getting the teeth was not easy, after all. Just to reach that 46-foot shaft, with the original entrance closed, you had to spelunk through more than 1,600 feet of cave, a few hundred of them on your hands and knees, a few tens on your belly. Eudald Carbonell i Roura, José María Bermúdez de Castro Risueño, and Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras started making that journey in the early 1980s--but in their case it was not for love, or at least not for the ordinary kind. Carbonell is an archeologist from Tarragona; Bermúdez and Arsuaga are paleoanthropologists from Madrid. In 1976 a graduate student had descended into the Sima and had emerged with bear teeth, yes, but also with a very old human mandible. That jawbone is what started it all.
Nowadays, though, only Arsuaga mines the Sima, along with his team from Complutense University. Carbonell and Bermúdez prefer to work outdoors. Carbonell has vivid memories of his seasons in the pit. One of the first things he and his colleagues had to do was carry out, on their backs, four tons of mud churned up by centuries of bear-tooth hunters. It was awful, he says. It was very, very, very hard. I remember: it was very, very, very hard. One day in the Sima he found himself nodding off-- not from the fatigue of digging for hours in a space in which he couldn’t stand up, and not from boredom, but from the lack of oxygen. He tried his lighter; it wouldn’t ignite. His companions were dozing too. He shook them awake and they all crawled out to daylight, gasping. Many times, Carbonell goes on, visitors who could not stand the close confines had to be hauled out of the Sima, through a passage that narrows to less than two feet. One time a television producer had a heart attack in the cave.
But we are not going to dwell on the Pit of Bones.
