Sima de las Palomas

Located in Torre Pacheco (Region of Murcia), in a hill named Cabezo Gordo there is a paleontological site whose name is Sima de Las Palomas (Chasm of Pigeons). This place shows the presence of individuals belonging to the species Homo heidelbergensis. These creatures inhabited this territory in the period from 150,000 BC to 125,000 BC. Neanderthals also lived in this area from 120,000 BC to 35,000 BC.
The Palomas Chasm (Torre Pacheco, Region of Murcia, Spain), located in the Cabezo Gordo, is a karstic chasm 20 meters deep in which numerous human remains of hominids dating back to the Middle and Upper Pleistocene have been found , between 150,000 years and 30,000 BP.
After the discovery in 1991 of a fossil in this chasm by a naturalist, its cleaning in the laboratory revealed that it was part of upper and lower human jaws, of Neanderthal type. After later scientific excavations, fossils and a skull belonging to the ancestors of the Neanderthals, that is, the pre-Neandertals of Homo heidelbergensis, with an antiquity of 150,000 years, as well as of Homo neanderthalensis, as well as their Mousterian Paleolithic industry and Upper Pleistocene fauna, 100,000 years old, more or less approaching the end of its presence in Europe, something that has been possible to date thanks to the collaboration of researchers from the University of Murcia with the University of Oxford.
The profusion of fossil remains of different animals as well as the Mousterian lithic industry associated with Neanderthals is abundant and in the excavation campaign carried out in 2009, evidence of what appear to be funerary burials has appeared.
Michael Walker, professor of Anthropology at the University of Murcia is the scientific coordinator of the excavation project of the Pigeons' chasm as well as that of the Black Cave (in Caravaca, Region of Murcia). Both sites are also co-managed by Dr. María Haber Uriarte and the archaeologist Mariano López Martínez.
The construction of the Paleontological Museum and the Human Evolution of the Region of Murcia is foreseen in the vicinity of the chasm in which the findings of this and other fossil deposits of the Region of Murcia will be exhibited.