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Sima de los Huesos hominins
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Search complete. 3 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Sima de los Huesos hominins".
Oct 15, 2026
speaker_1HOST
Yeah.
speaker_1HOST
There's some cranial depression fracturing in the Sima de los Huesos pre-Neanderthals in Spain, a healed skull injury on the Saint-Césaire Neanderthal in France, and a few scattered others.
speaker_1HOST
But the vast overwhelming majority of evidence for warfare, murder, and systemic violent conflict doesn't appear in the archeological record until periods of settled agricultural societies thousands of years later.
speaker_0HOST
Which makes sense economically if you think about it.
Harini BhatHOST
And this isn't the only strange pit of bones out there.
Harini BhatHOST
In northern Spain, there's a site called Sima de los Huesos, literally Pit of the Bones, where the remains of at least 28 individuals lie at the bottom of a 40-foot vertical shaft about 430,000 years old.
Harini BhatHOST
Nobody knows how those bodies got down there either.
Harini BhatHOST
But that group is lopsided in a completely different direction.
Elena EsselGUEST
And when I kind of started to attend those meetings, I was like, wait, this is much cooler than what I actually plan to do, because what they are doing is like time traveling.
Elena EsselGUEST
Like a few years before the Sina de los Huesos paper came out to date, the oldest human DNA was 420,000 years roughly.
Elena EsselGUEST
And I had no idea that this was possible.
Elena EsselGUEST
And so over the time as a student assistant, I got more and more excited about these methods that make it possible to look into DNA that is 420,000 years old.