Back in the summer of 2003 ... :

On a hot July afternoon, my daughter (then 12) and I reluctantly climbed out of an air conditioned train onto a sizzling platform apparently stranded in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Southern Spain. Only when the train left could we see that there was actually a minuscule station on the other side of the tracks, and a palaeoanthropologist -- easily identified by a picture of hominid skulls on his t-shirt -- was waiting to meet us. We had come to this remote area in order to help as volunteers in an excavation at a cave site where dozens of Neanderthal remains had been found over the past ten years. No previous experience required, four meals and youth-hostel style accommodation included in the price. The adventure starts here.  

The Tuesday of our arrival is taken up by the changing of the guards. Another 15-strong team of volunteers has worked in a different cave further North for three weeks, and they have come down to see “our” cave before they leave. They are in high spirits, having discovered a hand-axe at their site, which made the news on national television. At lunch time, we are the only newbies at the table, but by dinner time, the leavers have left and most arrivals have shown up. Wednesday should be a working day, but the professor is kept away by other duties, so we only do a guided tour of the excavation site and a few other caves in the same mountain. The cave is essentially a deep vertical hole in the limestone rocks, big enough to house a builder 's scaffold. It is accessible through a horizontal tunnel dug by miners or through the upper end.  

As we, unlike some, enjoy the climb up to the entrance of the cave, we get the privilege of being part of the first team of three diggers to work on the actual excavation site, which is operated from the top of a scaffold, just below the entrance. Materials go down the cave by pulley and are then carried out through the miners ' access. At the “upper cutting”, we have two excavation fields, measuring a square metre each, which are taken off very slowly with small trowels. The relatively loose sediment is peppered with bones, but sadly, most of them stem from small animals, such as rabbits. Bits and pieces of deer or turtle are already much rarer. No signs of humans or other big carnivores on the first day. Bones picked up during the excavation work go into a tray, and all the rest goes down the pulley in buckets, to be collected in bags at the bottom.  

As the heat makes it impossible to work at the site after 2 pm, there is an extended lunch break including a visit to the swimming pool and time for a siesta. In the late afternoon, we go back to work, taking the bags from the excavation site to the next step, namely the sieving. This takes place at the marble factory on the other side of the mountain, where there is a hose with a particularly strong water jet, which helps to break up the dirt and pass it through the set of three sieves with decreasing pore sizes. Then we scrutinize the sieves and pick out all bones, anything that might be a stone tool, and even snail shells. The latter are of interest not for their own sake, but for the samples of soil they encapsulate. All these finds go into trays, labelled with the date and location of origin, but so far unsorted.   

Friday is the day of the local patron saint, so the marble factory is closed and there is no wet sieving. Instead we install a huge dry sieve at the miners ' entrance to the cave and sieve through the rubble dumped there. Such second hand material is less valuable because it lacks precise geological context, but then again, one can process it more rapidly and finds more and bigger bones with less trouble. And we shouldn't forget that major finds have been made in other people 's rubbish. At the Neanderthal site, where quarry workers found the original skull cap that led to the definition of the species Homo neanderthalensis, the recent re-investigation of the soil that those workers discarded yielded a wealth of Neanderthal remains. Oh well, one is allowed to dream, isn 't one. In this particular heap of rubble we find pieces of antlers, turtle shells, and a flint flake, but no human bones.   

Late Friday afternoon we get to know the last step of the procedures, sorting the finds. There are more than a dozen different categories, for bones and teeth that are burnt or unburnt, from small or large animals, classifiable or unclassifiable. Unclassifiable is a popular choice, as all bones in that heap -- typically pieces of bone shaft without a joint or a specific shape that would allow to identify their origins -- will go in one plastic bag, never to be looked at again. In contrast, each bone deemed to be classifiable has to be put into a small plastic bag of its own, with a label. Our task ends with the bagging, counting and combining bags into bigger bags. But some unfortunate biologists will one day face the task of looking at all the classifiable bones again and work out the stories they may be able to tell us. It appears that the cave sheltered not only Neanderthals but also some other meat eaters, such as foxes or owls. From the relative abundance of the various bones (vertebrae are suspiciously scarce), researchers may be able to figure out who ate whom and when.  

After the sorting exercise, the Professor holds a talk about the previous work at the two sites. He shows some casts of the human remains found previously, and the original hand-axe discovered a couple of weeks ago. Seeing the hand-axe, a vaguely oval, fist-sized piece of rock with bits chipped off only around the edges, and the sharp end broken off, comes as a shock to most of us. Imagine that thing turning up caked in dirt -- I am sure we wouldn 't have recognized it as a tool (as in fact the person who dug it out didn 't, either). For all I know, I may have thrown five hand-axes away during the dry-sieving. Oh well. I 'm sure someone else will find them when they sieve through our rubble.  

Saturday we are offered a tour of the other site, plus a Roman monument and a recently discovered Neolithic round house. Sunday, the marble factory is still closed, so it is another day of dry sieving and sorting. No hand-axes in sight, even though we now know what they are supposed to look like.  

Monday is our last working day, as we have only booked in for the first week of the 3-week dig. First thing in the morning we have another go at the excavation fields together with a newly arrived volunteer. He gets lucky and finds a femur head, which is the ball-shaped end of the thigh bone, which goes into the hip joint. It might be human, but then again, it might be any other large mammal just as well. Biologists will have to have a closer look at that one.  

In the afternoon, we 're back at the marble factory scrutinizing the wet sieves. It 's getting late, and as we are beginning to tackle the very last sieve, my daughter dips her hand in and pulls out something that was a bit whiter than the rocks and dirt. “This could be a human tooth, couldn 't it?” she asks me. As an absolute layperson in anatomy, I think it could, but don 't trust my judgement, so I turn to the assistant standing next to me and ask him the same question. He looks at me as though he is absolutely certain I am trying to pull his leg, then he looks at the tooth and changes his expression. “In fact, yes, it is a human tooth.”  Of course we examine every speck of dirt in this lucky sieve very very closely, but to the end of the first week, this tooth remains the only unequivocally Neanderthal find. On Tuesday, we 're off to the beach, but the rest of the people have two more weeks to find further remains of the owner of our tooth.  

© Michael Gross 2003