The First Work of Art Known to Man

At 430,000 years old, an axe blade discovered within a cave in Atapuerca, Spain is the earliest evidence of symbolic thinking known to man. Here's the story.

“Excalibur” — the world’s oldest example of symbolic thinking. Image via the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration

The locals in Atapuerca, Spain have a long-standing tradition. Their young men climb into the limestone caves on the outskirts of town to find fossilized bear teeth for their fiancées. It is a symbolic way of demonstrating a young man’s mettle and ardor. If the young caballero is willing to crawl and cramp his way through limestone hell and abseil into some pit, then his senorita can be reasonably sure that he’s willing to travel through hell and high water for her.

And whether she wants to tuck that bear tooth in a jewelry box as a private matter or share her treasure among laughing friends, you know that every last senorita in Atapuerca wants one of those teeth, the deeper it’s been pulled out of the cave, the better. And the caballero, six footballs fields into the hillside, praying to God that his headlamp doesn’t go out, wants one of them too. It means something that tooth, although nobody in town could really tell you why or what exactly.

Atapuerca’s caves are not far from Burgos, in Northern Spain. They are buried in the gently rolling parched hills, beneath the heat and the yellow grass and for a thousand years Campostella pilgrims have walked directly over them. Then in 1910 a railroad excavation cut a giant gash into the hillside and it opened the cave system up completely, exposing all sorts of access points– not to mention access to fossilized bear teeth for the locals.

Knowledge of the caves goes back at least three hundred years. A man carved “Fray Manuel Ruiz” and then, just below it, “1645” into one of the cave walls. Other than the fact that he couldn’t resist the ancient temptation to etch his name onto things, that’s all that anybody really knows about him. For a season, up until the mid 1970’s, the cave systems at Atapuerca were celebrated for the cave painting of a horse head mistakenly dated to the Ice Age, but once this error was corrected, it was directly back to obscurity. Nothing in the Cueva Mayor was believed to be of true archaeological significance.

But in 1976 a Spanish paleontology grad student, Trino Torres, searching for fossilized bear bones discovered a jaw of something decidedly not ursine, then some familiar-shaped teeth, and finally fragments of what looked like a human skull. Torres brought them out of the pit and up to his professor. No, they were not the cave bear Ursus deningeri, the professor agreed, but what were they exactly? They looked human.

 Ish.

The professor, Emiliano Aguirre, confirmed the bones as human, and with clues from the surrounding environment dated the hominid bones to be in the neighborhood of 350,000 years old¹. Human bones from this era are not all that common anywhere, and within two years Aguirre had an excavation permit and kicked off a major research project.

He was off and rolling. By 1983 scientists were working the location in earnest. Teams were spending a month every summer digging in the cave, sifting through the clay, misting little bits and pieces of fossil bone with spray bottles of water and hauling everything back up the claustrophobic passageway into daylight. The remainder of each year they spend cataloging what they’d pulled up that summer.

Getting to the site, which has been named La Sima de Los Huesos or ‘The Pit of Bones’, is no mean feat. It requires a healthy individual, not to mention somebody reasonably courageous, like, say, the kind of person who might climb the ship’s mast in a storm to untangle the rigging. To get in there you have to scramble on your hands and knees some 500 yards into the hillside. Then you have to navigate the 50 foot drop-off on a trembling roll-up metal ladder. Once you’re finally at the five-story bottom you then need to crawl yet further back into the labyrinth to get to the Sima bones themselves. It’s quite a journey to get there and your work day hasn’t even started.

At the site itself, scientists move on their bellies about the cramped space on a horizontal scaffolding structure of pipes and loose wooden boards that they slide into the best position for each new chunk of work. The teams spend their summer beneath the exposed mechanic’s hand-held auto-clamp light fixtures arrayed about the worksite. They scrape and brush and sift the hard compacted dirt floor, sectioned off by thick wires into workable sectors. It is hellish work, dirty, exhausting and claustrophobic.

There are photographs they’ve taken of the site, and they show thick clusters of bones stuffed into the earth, rows of teeth and sharp thick shards of bone jammed and sticking out in every direction. The exuberant archaeologist hardly knows where to start, and, not surprisingly, the rewards from the site over the last thirty years have been phenomenal. The Sima is now one of the most important paleontological sites in the world. Archaeologists there have already unearthed 75% of the world’s known human fossils that date from 100,000 to 1.5 million years ago. And what’s dug up is still only a tiny fraction of the site. Less than 3 percent has even been touched. It is a paleontologist’s treasure chest.

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In the Pit of Bones where this staggering collection of fossils are found, the team has unearthed at least 32 pre-Neanderthal individuals, and there is a weird and wonderful quality to what archaeologists have been able to guess at. From the asymmetrical scrape marks and wear on the molars, for example, they believe the humans to have been right-handed; that none of the dead had cavities; that they ate raw fruits and vegetables; that one of them was deaf in one ear; that another had a mouth infection and likely died of septicemia; that they must have used toothpicks. (I have no idea how they figured that out.)²

They can tell you that there is a roughly even distribution of male and female among the bones, that there are no infants and only two adults in the pit. The bones in the Sima, for the most part, belonged to adolescents. It is tempting to write, and not inaccurately, that it is a pit of “teenager bones” although the dangers of projecting our own world view onto words like teenager are too easy and, of course, suspect.

But still, the young.

There was some early speculation that these bones were brought deep into this lair by feasting carnivores, but the surrounding evidence weighs against that. Other than the miscellaneous bones of cave dwelling mammals that likely fell into the pit by accident or were washed into it later on, there are no herbivores or other bones from creatures that live outside the caves. Carnivores may eat their catch in solitude but they need to hunt in the open where animals roam. And carnivores aren’t gourmands; they don’t specialize in a single species of prey, like, say, adolescent human beings. They eat what they can catch, so the complete lack of variety in the bones is all wrong for the Carnivore’s Lair theory. There is, moreover, no telltale carnivore damage on the bones themselves. There are no bite marks or patterns of molar-crushed bone. There is even strong evidence that one of the bodies was cared for before being left in the pit.

Hold that thought.

There was also speculation that the site was a living quarters, that maybe the occupants were suddenly killed there en masse or trapped within somehow. But the Living Quarters theory hasn’t held up either. There are no signs that fires were ever lit in the proximity or that food preparation took place there. There are no tools of daily human cave life. No herbivore remains or signs of other likely human food. When you take into account the difficulties in accessing the site, the cave simply isn’t suitable for a human dwelling, all of which raises the interesting question as to why these adolescent bones are gathered there in the first place half a million years ago.

The prevailing theory remains that bodies were deliberately disposed there by other humans, deep within this pit at the end of the long crawl, at the bottom of a shaft, and tucked away far in the back. Of course it would have been no mean feat spelunking the dead bodies down there either. There is speculation that the bodies might have been carried as a group effort or dragged on skins and then dropped into the shaft and then dragged a second time, making the whole effort enormously difficult for an effort in dealing with, let’s say, something you considered to be as dead and lifeless as an animal carcass. But, for some reason, this group of cave dwellers seem to have done exactly that. They made a point of carrying their dead back there, in the dark pit, a certain segment of their young dead in particular.

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There wasn’t much more to move the speculation one way or the other until 1998 when an ax blade fashioned from red quartzite surfaced among the bones. The archaeologists dubbed the biface Excalibur. Right away they noted that the quartzite used to make it was not available in the immediate vicinity, and more significantly, that the blade is the only item of its kind in the pit – among 4,000 bones. This seemed to argue, in its way, for the axe blade being special, significant to the owners who left it, suggesting that it was deliberately created and then placed there on its own, among the adolescent corpses.

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It is a completely unscientific observation, but when you see a picture of Excalibur (a copy is at the Museum of Natural History in New York) and study it for a moment, imagining it was something a friend made or your son, then you would be tempted to say that it is handsome and well-made. The color of the stone is appealing, but more attractive still is the perfect gothic arch of its rounded blade. It is completely symmetrical and carefully fashioned with tiny, exacting chips. Sometimes when you see ancient tools, they look like they have been made in about two or three minutes, the business end created with five or six good glancing blows where great chunks have come off, leaving sharp, workable edges. The maker maybe has refined those chips a tad more, getting better scalloped indentations for something adequately serviceable to cut or kill. But this axe blade isn’t that.

Excalibur is of a different order. It is more than just a sharp tool. Somebody spent some time on this thing, chip-chip-chipping away one evening, maybe an entire evening. It’s symmetry is the result of careful hand-eye coordination and checking and double-checking and holding the silhouette up to the firelight. It is my guess, and a rank amateur one at that, but I would estimate it took at least a couple of hours of work, and maybe upwards of a whole evening to fashion the Excalibur stone.

You could say that, in its way, with its lovely color and careful symmetry, that it is almost like a small piece of sculpture. Of course we know nothing of the possible handle ornamentation and decorations that might have covered it at the time. It certainly doesn’t seem to be an item of utility. Yes, the hard facts might argue somebody could have inadvertently dropped an axe in the pit simply moving the bodies around. But this axe?

No.

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Nobody has any idea what Excalibur was supposed to mean placed among those young bodies. Just like inquiring minds, a thousand millenniums from now, won’t understand why a fossilized bear tooth was placed in a woman’s jewelry box or clasped in the tight fist of a cave climber. But the hatchet was likely an element in a funeral rite of some sort. Which means, at up to 600,000 years old³, that Excalibur is the planet’s first evidence of symbolic thinking, and La Sima de Los Huesos is now the oldest known cemetery in the world.⁴

We recognize in the quartz ax the human insistence that this thing means that thing. As a strict matter of fact, metaphorical equations don’t make the least bit of sense. They are grounded in nothing, one thing can’t actually be another thing. Things aren’t ideas; they are things. Ideas, like language, can’t even be properly said to exist. They are not materialized. A corpse is a corpse. A rock is a rock. But ideas — like language itself — aren’t even vapor.

Now humans are now so used to approaching the world through metaphor that we completely miss the fundamental absurdity. We can no more live our lives without metaphor than I can read without my glasses. But isn’t the metaphorical intention in the rose quartz ax blade, whatever it might have been, the beautiful soul of Excalibur? Isn’t it what binds these dawn of time ancestors to ourselves and makes them so startlingly human?

Why, after all, would a dead teenager need a rose quartz hatchet? It is absurd, no? Even the firelight sculptor couldn’t tell you. Not a rational answer, anyway. But after 430,000 years and 21,500 generations of grandparents and rivers of forgotten religions, we recognize the ancient pattern as what it is to be a human being: the same use of metaphor in the face of death, the same need for persisted artistry, the same hope for things that can only be seen in the flickering half-light of symbols.

There is also the same hope or even intuition that we’re on a larger journey somehow, that we might need the ax, or the thing it represents, at some point. It’s like we’re still in the same cave, waiting on the same heaven. It’s who we are and who we have aways been. We’re still saying goodbye. We’re still rolling away the same stone.

We’re still leaving art in the wake.

This piece was originally part of Finisterre a memoir about the Camino de Santiago and a tribute to a deceased girlfriend. (It’s own funereal art in the wake.) Relevant chapters here.

1. This was the original estimate. It has since been revised to 430,000. See additional footnotes below as the dating has been fluid.

2. The sleuthing gets even more astonishing: here’s a link to an interpretation about an elderly early hominid that couldn’t defend himself but was protected by his tribe.

3. There is no consistent online dating for the age as it has changed in multiple rounds of DNA testing approaches. 430,000 seems to be the number paleontologists are settling on.

4. This makes the humans twice as old as homo sapiens. For perspective, Neanderthals are only 40,000 years old.