Atapuerca is a group of caves in a low ridge near Burgos, in northern Spain. A 19th-century railway cutting sliced the hill open and exposed them, and they have since produced the richest record of human evolution in Europe. The rule for reading the site is simple: the deeper the layer, the older the people in it.
Across the whole sequence — more than a million years — there are five kinds of human. This document goes through them oldest to youngest. Each entry is laid out the same way: the kind of human, when they lived (the time period and dates), the climate of that period, then the descriptions we actually have (face and body, skin/hair/eyes, and the differences between men, women and children), then their activities (tools, food, shelter and what they did), and finally a short note on what is solid evidence versus an informed guess.
One thing to flag up front, because it affects every picture: deep-time and Ice-Age Europeans were not pale-skinned. Dark skin is the safe default; pale skin only became common in Europe in the last few thousand years.
Time period: late Early Pleistocene, about 1.1–1.4 million years ago. Site: Sima del Elefante (level TE7). Specimen ATE7-1, found 2022 and published 2025 — the oldest human face known in Western Europe. (“aff.” means “with affinity to”: close to Homo erectus, but not certainly it.)
Climate & landscape. The warmest, wettest and most wooded of the five worlds. The hill itself — a low limestone ridge above the Arlanzón river — already stood where it does now, but the country around it was far greener and damper. The animals fossilised alongside this person are the giveaway: frogs, toads, newts, water-loving snakes and damp-ground small mammals, creatures that only live where there is permanent standing and running water. So picture a warm, humid, temperate landscape — patches of broadleaf woodland opening onto grassy clearings, threaded by streams, marshy hollows and reedy pools, with deer and horse drawn down to the water. Winters were gentle and there was no real dry season. This well-watered, easy setting is exactly why the earliest people here needed neither fire nor clothing, and it makes the riverbank the natural backdrop for any scene — the place they came to drink, to ambush game, and to find stone.
How they looked. All we actually have is the left cheekbone and upper jaw of one person, so the face is built outward from a single fragment — but what that fragment shows is real and specific: a midface that juts forward, heavily built, with a flat, low-bridged nose set into a broad cheek. It is the face of Homo erectus, though a touch narrower and shorter than the antecessor face found higher up the hill. Everything else is borrowed from better-known Homo erectus skeletons elsewhere, and should be drawn as such: a low, long, loaf-shaped braincase behind a shelf-like brow, deep-set eyes, a forward-set jaw with no chin, and, below the neck, a tall, lean, long-legged body with narrow hips and a flat chest — a striding long-distance walker, not a stooped “caveman.” The honest way to depict this individual is to render the cheek and nose with confidence and keep the top and back of the head understated, because they are inference rather than fossil.
Skin, hair, eyes. No pigmentation can be read from a fossil this old, so treat this as an artist's default, not a finding — dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. Avoid pale or “European” skin.
Men, women, children. With a single cheekbone there is no way to tell whether this person was a man or a woman, or to show any real difference between the sexes — so a man, woman or child here can only follow Homo erectus in general: men somewhat taller and heavier, with thicker brows and bigger jaws; women smaller and lighter-boned; children scaled down, with softer, less projecting faces. Keep those differences understated, since none of them comes from this fossil.
Activities. Show them at work rather than posed. Their stone kit is the simplest there is: a cobble of quartz, chert or limestone held in one hand and struck with a hammerstone to knock off sharp-edged flakes — no shaped handaxes yet. The cut marks those flakes left on animal bone in the same layer tell us exactly what they were for: slicing meat off carcasses and scraping it from the bone. There was no fire here, so meat and plants were eaten raw, and there is no trace of clothing in this mild climate — bare skin, or at most a hide thrown over the shoulders. They built nothing; the mouth of the cave and the open ground beside it were simply where they sheltered and butchered. The wider significance is quiet but large: “Pink” shares the same hillside, at a deeper level, with the later antecessor — proof that at least two different kinds of human were already living in early Europe.
What's solid, what's a guess. Solid: the midface and its forward, flat-nosed shape; the age; the stone tools and cut-marked bones; the presence of a second species. Guesswork: the braincase, the whole body, the sex, skin/hair/eye colour, and any clothing.
Time period: late Early Pleistocene, about 850,000 years ago (at least 780,000). Site: Gran Dolina (level TD6, the “Aurora Stratum”). Over 160 fragments from 11+ individuals; named in 1997; the type fossil, ATD6-69, is a child.
Climate & landscape. Still warm and humid, but noticeably more open than “Pink's” world. The climate reconstruction for this exact layer is unusually precise: the year averaged roughly 2°C warmer than Burgos today, summers warmer still, with substantially more rain than now, falling mostly in spring and autumn. The vegetation was an open, savannah-like woodland rather than closed forest — scattered trees and copses standing over wide, damp meadows, with thicker ribbons of trees following the rivers. Game moved through this half-open country in numbers: red and fallow deer, wild horse, bison, even rhinoceros, grazing the meadows and watering at the streams. A nice touch for a wide establishing shot: these people are thought to have spread back up onto the high plateau from the Mediterranean coast along the green corridor of the Ebro valley once the climate warmed after a cold spell — so they were relative newcomers crossing a recovering, open landscape.
How they looked. The face is the famous part, and it is genuinely startling. Known mostly from a 10-to-11-year-old child (specimen ATD6-69), it is flat and pulled in beneath the eyes, with a distinct hollow under the cheekbone (a “canine fossa”) and a forward-jutting nose — the earliest face in the whole fossil record that already looks like ours. Yet it is set on an unmistakably archaic head: a long, low braincase, a continuous bony brow ridge, a flat retreating forehead, no chin, and a deep jaw carrying large teeth. The brain was around 1,000 cc, below the modern average. From the neck down — known from a collarbone, a forearm, knee bones and a few vertebrae and ribs — the body was tall, upright and modern in its proportions, long-limbed and well-muscled. So picture a near-modern face and a modern-looking body beneath a low, brow-ridged, chinless skull. One telling detail for the face: their front teeth are heavily worn and chipped from being used like a “third hand” to grip and pull, so even a young adult's smile would look hard-used.
Skin, hair, eyes. Same as “Pink” — far too old to read pigmentation, so default to dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes.
Men, women, children. Men were larger and more heavily built, with thicker brows and bigger jaws; women smaller and lighter — both carrying the same flat, modern-looking midface. Children are unusually central to this site: the famous face is a child's, and many of the individuals are children and teenagers. A child's face would read as almost modern head-on, then give itself away in profile with a low, sloping forehead and a faint brow. And an evidence-based touch worth using: these people grew up faster than modern children and reached adult size younger, so a “teenager” here can already look physically grown.
Activities. Their stone working is still the simple flake-and-core kind — over 800 pieces in this one layer, struck from quartz and chert, with no shaped handaxes and no fire to cook on. Picture them at the mouth of Gran Dolina breaking down carcasses they had hunted or scavenged: red and fallow deer above all, with horse, bison and even rhino, the meat eaten raw (their badly worn teeth confirm it). The hardest scene to depict is also the best evidenced. This layer holds the oldest clear case of human cannibalism: human bodies — most of them children and teenagers — were skinned, cut apart, filleted, and their long bones cracked open for marrow, using exactly the same tools and the same technique as on the deer, then tossed in among the animal scraps. It was not a single act of starvation but a repeated practice, perhaps a way of seeing off rival groups. If you show it, show it matter-of-factly — that ordinariness is the unsettling, accurate part.
What's solid, what's a guess. Solid: the modern face on an archaic skull; the ~1,000 cc brain; the tall, modern-like body; the simple tools, lack of fire and raw diet; the cannibalism. Guesswork: skin/hair/eye colour, exact stature, clothing, and the soft tissue of nose, lips and ears.
Time period: Middle Pleistocene, about 430,000 years ago. Site: Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of Bones”), a chamber deep inside Cueva Mayor. More than 6,500 fossils from around 28 individuals — roughly 90% of all the Middle-Pleistocene human bone known on Earth. (Long called Homo heidelbergensis, but their DNA places them on the Neanderthal line, so they are best understood as early Neanderthals.)
Climate & landscape. A temperate landscape that had grown a little cooler and drier than the lush deep-time world, but was still comfortable and never severe at this latitude. Picture an open, almost park-like woodland — oak and pine standing over broad grassy clearings, with the river and its gallery of trees winding below the hill. The long-term trend across the whole sequence was towards more open country, and the climate was swinging in and out of the ice-age cycles; but here it was relatively stable, and big game stayed plentiful. Horse and red deer were the mainstays, with rhinoceros, bison and the heavy-set cave bear (whose bones fill the same cave system) sharing the slopes and woods. For a scene this is an unforced, green, parkland backdrop — not a frozen wasteland but rolling wooded hills under a temperate sky, herds in the middle distance, and the dark mouth of the cave system in the rock.
How they looked. This is where the Neanderthal face begins to assemble. Picture a big, broad face built forward around a large, projecting nose; a heavy brow that arches over each eye and runs unbroken across the bridge of the nose; cheekbones that already start to sweep backward rather than out; and no chin. The braincase is large — 1,100 to 1,400 cc, squarely in our range — but longer and lower than ours. From the neck down, the bones (this site preserves them in extraordinary numbers) show people who were tall for their time and powerfully built: thick-boned, wide-bodied, with a clear, modern-style size gap between larger men and smaller women. Real individuals give you models to draw from — “Miguelón” (Cranium 5, the most complete early-human skull ever found), the partial skulls “Agamenón” and “Rui,” and a broad, deep male hip bone nicknamed “Elvis.”
Skin, hair, eyes. Their DNA is on the Neanderthal line, which lacks the light-pigment genes, so dark-to-medium skin, dark or brown hair, brown eyes.
Men, women, children. The size difference between the sexes was about like ours: larger, more rugged men — “Elvis” is a big, broad-hipped male — and smaller, lighter women, both with the same heavy brow and jutting nose. The group skews young; most of the twenty-eight are adolescents and young adults. The most human detail of all is a child (Cranium 14) born with a fused, lopsided skull who nonetheless lived for years — which means a child who could not have fended alone was being looked after by the others. Several adults also show the heavy front-tooth wear of using the mouth as a “third hand” to grip hide and wood.
Activities. Two things make this group feel close to us. First, they had the equipment for speech: the bones of their outer and middle ear are tuned, like ours, to the 1–5 kHz band that carries the information in spoken language — quite unlike a chimpanzee — and a preserved hyoid bone and a reconstructed vocal tract point the same way, so it is reasonable to imagine quiet, spoken conversation rather than grunting. Second, the pit records a deliberate act: twenty-eight bodies carried deep into the cave and dropped down a 13-metre shaft, with no everyday debris and a single, never-used red handaxe (“Excalibur,” below) among them — read by many as the oldest funerary behaviour known. Out on the hillside they were big-game hunters and skilled stoneworkers, shaping symmetrical Acheulean handaxes and taking horse, deer, rhino and bison, most likely with wooden thrusting spears; there was no fire down in the pit. One skull, Cranium 17, carries two identical holes punched by the same weapon, struck twice — the oldest known case of one human deliberately killing another.
What “Excalibur” is. Excalibur is a hand-axe — a teardrop-shaped stone tool worked on both faces (a “biface”) — found in the pit in 1998 and named, half in jest, after King Arthur's sword. It matters because it is the only stone tool in the entire Sima de los Huesos, lying among the roughly 28 bodies. It was made from a fine, veined red quartzite that is rare in the area, it is fairly large (about 155 × 97 × 58 mm and 685 g), and it shows no sign of ever having been used. Because it is the single object accompanying the dead, of unusual quality and an unusual colour, the excavators (Eudald Carbonell and colleagues) argued it may have been placed there deliberately — a grave offering, which would make it one of the oldest hints of symbolic or funerary behaviour anywhere. Like the “burial” reading of the pit itself, this interpretation is debated; but it is why Excalibur is treated as a star find. You can see a photograph of the real tool via the link in the images list below.
What's solid, what's a guess. Solid: the Neanderthal-leaning faces and big brains; the 28 individuals; “Excalibur”; Cranium 17's lethal wound; the cared-for disabled child; the Neanderthal-line DNA. Guesswork: skin/hair/eye colour, why the bodies are in the pit (funerary versus a natural trap is debated), and any clothing.
Time period: Late Pleistocene — the last Ice Age — about 115,000–70,000 years ago. Site: Galería de las Estatuas (Cueva Mayor–Cueva del Silo system). Almost no bone — a single toe bone — plus Neanderthal DNA recovered directly from the cave sediment.
Climate & landscape. The cold, swinging chapter. This window runs from the tail of the last warm interglacial into the slide towards the height of the last great Ice Age, so the backdrop is not one frozen scene but a landscape that oscillated — and overall it was cooler, drier and far more continental than anything earlier, with long, hard winters. Most of the time, picture an open steppe-woodland: grassy, wind-swept high plateau with stands of pine and hardy trees, browner and barer than the lush deep-time forests. The cave's own pollen, though, records a warmer pulse when the trees thickened up again — so a greener or a starker version can both be justified, depending on the moment you choose. The cold is the whole reason these people, unlike the earlier groups, kept fires and wrapped themselves in worked hide. Their prey here was above all red deer and wild horse (the animals the cave actually preserves), and they ranged widely: dozens of their open-air camps dot the hills around the sierra, so they worked the whole landscape, not just the cave mouth.
How they looked. The fully assembled Neanderthal, and one we know in fine detail from the wider record. The head is long and low but holds a very large brain (often 1,200–1,750 cc, on average bigger than ours), capped by a bun-shaped bulge at the back of the skull. The face is unmistakable: a thick, rounded brow ridge over big eye sockets; the whole midface pulled forward around a large, wide nose (built to warm and moisten cold, dry air); cheekbones that sweep back rather than out; and a heavy, chinless jaw with big front teeth. The body is short and powerfully built — men averaged about 1.65 m and 80 kg — with a deep, wide “barrel” chest, broad hips, and short forearms and shins that conserved heat. They were far more heavily muscled than us, with large joints, thick-walled bones, and broad-tipped, vice-like hands. Two cautions for the artist: recent rib-cage reconstructions show they stood fully upright with a straight spine, not stooped; and they were not brutish or ape-like — picture a stocky, immensely strong, fully human person.
Skin, hair, eyes. Neanderthal genomes carry very few light-pigment genes, so medium-to-dark skin, brown hair (red in a minority, from a rare gene variant), mostly brown eyes. The pale “European” Neanderthal is an old painting habit, not the genetics — a single red-haired person in a group is fine.
Men, women, children. Men were big and thick-set — roughly 1.65 m, heavily muscled, with the largest brows and noses; women shorter (around 1.55 m) and lighter, but still robust and strong by modern standards. Neanderthal children were stocky and grew up somewhat faster than modern children, reaching a sturdy, grown look young. At this particular cave the only human bone is a single toe, but Neanderthal family bands always included children, so you can people a scene with them confidently.
Activities. This is the richest group to depict in action. They made tools by the demanding Levallois method — carefully shaping a flint core so a single, ready-edged flake could be struck off in one blow — producing points, knives and side-scrapers, some hafted onto wooden shafts with birch-bark tar (a glue they manufactured by heating bark). They hunted big game — horse, deer, bison — at close range with heavy thrusting spears, not by throwing from a distance: their lopsided, overdeveloped right arms and a fracture pattern resembling the injuries of rodeo riders both come from grappling with large, dangerous animals up close. Around the hearth — they used fire, unlike the earlier Atapuerca people — they scraped fresh hides clean with stone scrapers and pierced and worked them with bone awls into wraps and coverings (draped and tied, not yet sewn with eyed needles), so dress them in worked hide against the Ice-Age cold. The standout discovery here is not a skeleton at all: Neanderthal DNA pulled straight from the cave floor revealed that two genetically distinct Neanderthal populations used this cave, one replacing the other around 100,000 years ago.
What's solid, what's a guess. Solid: Neanderthal anatomy (from the wider Neanderthal record); the Mousterian tools and fire; hide-working; the sediment-DNA story and the two populations. Guesswork: the faces and bodies of these exact individuals (we have one toe bone), plus skin/hair shade and clothing detail.
Time period: the very end of the last Ice Age into the Holocene (our own era) — from about 13,500 years ago through to the Bronze Age, roughly 7,000 years of it at El Portalón alone. Sites: El Mirador and El Portalón, the youngest and shallowest caves.
Climate & landscape. A warming, then warm, then human-made world. As the Ice Age ended the climate climbed to roughly today's, and forest spread back over the hills — a mixed woodland of evergreen and deciduous oak with pine, the landscape the first farmers walked into. From here the change is driven as much by people as by weather. The pollen and charcoal preserved at El Mirador show the forest being eaten away from about 6,000 years ago: tree cover falling while the weeds and pasture plants that follow human disturbance rise, as Neolithic and Bronze-Age communities cleared and burned woodland for fields and grazing, against a slow natural drift toward a drier climate. So within this single entry the backdrop shifts from closed oak-and-pine forest to an increasingly open patchwork of cereal plots, cleared pasture and grazed scrub, dotted with flocks. One vivid, well-evidenced detail for a scene: El Mirador was used as a livestock pen, its floor a deep bed of sheep and goat dung that the herders periodically set alight to clean it out — so a faint haze of dung-smoke over the cave mouth is entirely true to life. The sierra sat at a natural crossroads of the northern plateau, the Iberian mountains and the Cantabrian country — a good place to live off a mixed, tamed landscape.
How they looked. Anatomically modern — in other words, us. A tall, round (globular) braincase sits above a short, flat face tucked in under the brain; the forehead rises vertically, the brow is slight or absent, and there is a true bony chin. The build is lighter and far less rugged than any of the earlier people here, with thinner bones and less extreme muscling. The early hunter-gatherers were lean and wiry; the later farmers were often a little shorter and sometimes carry the marks of hard, repetitive work — worn joints, strong forearms from grinding and carrying. In short, the one group you can draw straight from living people: the work is in the dress and the setting, not the anatomy.
Skin, hair, eyes. This changes across the period, and it is the detail reconstructions most often get wrong. The last hunter-gatherers had dark skin — ancient DNA from Iberia is clear on this — and, strikingly, blue eyes were already common before pale skin appeared. La Braña 1, a 7,000-year-old man from northern Spain, had dark skin and blue eyes. Pale skin only arrives later, with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia and then steppe herders, so lighten the skin gradually from the early hunters to the Bronze Age. Hair dark to brown; eyes brown to blue.
Men, women, children. The full modern range of size and build, with ordinary modern differences between the sexes. These were whole families living together in and around the caves, and the work was shared and visible: women feature heavily in the daily round of grinding grain, shaping and firing pots, and weaving cloth. Children were part of the household, and people of every age — children included — were buried inside the caves, sometimes laid out with simple grave goods.
Activities. This is the busy, settled world, and almost everything in it can be shown directly. These are the first people on the hill you dress rather than drape: real fitted clothing of woven cloth (flax linen, then wool once sheep arrive) and leather, with beads and ornaments. Their kit is full and varied — polished stone axes for felling trees and woodwork, flint-toothed sickles for reaping grain, saddle querns for grinding it into flour, fired clay pots for cooking and storage, the bow for hunting, and, from the Copper and Bronze Ages, metal blades and ornaments. El Portalón, at the cave mouth, was a true settlement lived in for some 7,000 years — huts, hearths, storage pits and pens for animals — while El Mirador served as a stable and sheepfold and a place to bury the dead. Around them the land was farmed: cleared plots of cereals and pulses, grazed pasture, and flocks of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs (with horses and dogs). Depictable scenes are everywhere — sowing and reaping, milking and herding, throwing and firing pots, weaving at a loom, grinding grain, a burial, or someone deep inside the Galería del Sílex painting and engraving the cave walls by the light of a lamp. And the hill's oldest habit lingers: there are clear episodes of cannibalism here too, in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, including cups fashioned from human skulls — evidently a ritual handling of the dead rather than mere hunger.
What's solid, what's a guess. Solid: modern anatomy; the farming-and-herding economy, pottery and metal; the burials and cave art; the cannibalism episodes; and direct ancient-DNA readings of skin, hair and eyes from Iberian people. Guesswork: the exact clothing styles in any one scene, and the precise skin shade for a given century (it lightens across the period). This is the best-evidenced of the five.
The Sierra de Atapuerca is a low limestone hill, about 1,080 m above sea level, standing just above the valley of the Arlanzón River (and its small tributaries, the Vena and the Pico), a little east of present-day Burgos. It sits where the wooded uplands meet the open plains of the northern Meseta. The river and the springs along the hill are why animals — and people — kept coming back, and the slow downcutting of that valley is what carved out the caves in the first place. The climate, though, was different in every period — warm and wet in the deep past, bitterly continental in the Ice Age, mild today — so each of the five entries above describes the particular world that kind of human lived in.
The animals that shared the valley, and were the main prey, were red and fallow deer, wild horse, bison and aurochs (wild cattle), rhinoceros and wild boar, alongside predators such as cave bear, cave lion and cave hyena, plus — in the warm phases — macaque monkeys and tortoises. Many are extinct forms that turned over through the sequence. From the Neolithic on, wild game gives way to domestic sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses and dogs.
The fossils themselves are kept and displayed at the Museo de la Evolución Humana in Burgos.
The photos above show the site and landscape as they are today. For the fossils, the Excalibur tool and artists' reconstructions of the faces, these links work and come from reliable sources:
A note on accuracy: this is a reference for a reconstruction project, not a peer-reviewed source. A few points worth keeping in mind — the Sima de los Huesos people are now read as early Neanderthals, not the textbook Homo heidelbergensis; “Pink” is known from a single midface, so its body is reconstructed from other Homo erectus; the skin, hair and eye colours of the three oldest kinds are reasoned defaults (dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes), not direct DNA readings, because the fossils are far too old to sequence; and all ages are approximate and still debated. The single most important correction for an artist: deep-time and Ice-Age Europeans were not pale — pale skin is a late, Neolithic-and-after arrival.