These are ancestral hominoids-the precursors to lesser apes, such as gibbons and siamangs, and to great apes, including orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and us. ![]() Reconstructing its environmental evolution may offer some insights for regional climate change today.Īmong the most important finds are fossils of primate species found nowhere else. Since 2002, Robles and other paleontologists from the Miquel Crusafont Catalán Institute of Paleontology (ICP), located at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have found more than 70,000 fossils from this period, when the region’s neotropical climate was becoming more arid. The soil of Can Mata holds a wide array of fossils spanning more than a million and a half years of the middle Miocene, from about 12.5 million to 11 million years ago. Then he’d back away, give the all-clear, and the mechanical roar of the excavator would begin once again. If it looked promising, he covered it with light-catching silver foil for excavation once the sun came up. Whenever he spotted a mass that had potential, he waved to the excavator operator to pause while he investigated the object more closely. At night Robles dressed in heavy layers, a head lamp strapped to his hard hat. Robles was one of three paleontologists on rotation to keep a close eye on the tons of tawny dirt displaced by the diggers.ĭuring the day, the sickly sweet aroma of rot drew squawking flocks of gulls the dirt, as soft and fine as powdered sugar, rose in small clouds with every step. ![]() Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the excavators plunged their metal claws into the earth in a rush to create yet another deep pit to hold trash from Barcelona and its surroundings. ![]() But that’s where paleontologist Josep Robles found himself in December 2019, on the hunt for clues to human evolutionary history.įor much of the previous few months, he’d spent several nights a week at Abocador de Can Mata, the largest landfill in the Catalonia region of Spain. Barcelona, SpainFewer places are less welcoming than a garbage dump on a frigid night.
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