Sima de las Palomas
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 | |
| Region | Region of Murcia |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 37°47′59″N 0°53′45″W / 37.79972°N 0.89583°W |
| Altitude | 123 m (404 ft)[1] |
| Type | Intermittent settlement |
| History | |
| Periods | Middle Paleolithic |
| Site notes | |
| Excavation dates | 1992- |
Sima de las Palomas ("Rock-Dove hole") is on Cabezo Gordo, located between Balsicas and San Javier in the Murcia region of Spain. It was inhabited for tens of thousands of years, by Neanderthals and others. The shaft was filled in with brecciated material in the Late Pleistocene, and was partly excavated by miners in the nineteenth century. In the rubble, fossil remains of humans, including those of Neanderthals, were found in the 1990s,[1] and after excavations in the shaft, in 2006-2007 a skeleton of a young Neanderthal woman was found,[2][3] possibly buried with her child.
The cave is in Torre-Pacheco, in the Region of Murcia. It is a vertical shaft in karst, in the Cabezo Gordo hill, and overlooks Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean. The cave is found under overhanging rock, 123 meters above sea level, and the shaft has a depth of 18 meters. It was filled with brecciated material in the Late Pleistocene, much of which was removed by 19th-century miners[1] who dug a horizontal tunnel toward the shaft, excavated much of it and left the rubble remains on the hillside.[4] The miners were probably looking for water to wash out iron ore for the mining concessions on the hill.[5])
Archeological investigation started when remains of an individual now called Palomas 1 were found in the rubble;[1] someone had abseiled into the shaft and found a fossil in the sediment a few meters down. It turned out to be the jaws of a Neanderthal, still together, and an important enough find to warrant scientific investigation. The researchers soon discovered that much of the shaft had been dug out and the remains dumped on the hillside; the miners had left an entire column of brecciated Pleistocene material, on the other side of the now 3-meter wide shaft. Excavation necessitated the building of scaffolding from the bottom of the shaft. The presence of nesting rock doves at the time of the investigation gave the shaft its name.[5] Between 1992 and 1999, rubble from the mine was investigated, and after 1994 the shaft itself was investigated; those investigations continue today,[1] under the auspices of the Murcian Association for the Study of Palaeoanthropology and the Quaternary.[6]