A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Guillermo Rodríguez-Gómez, from CENIEH recently has published in the journal PLoS ONE, a paper about the absence of human groups in the Sierra de Atapuerca 600,000 years ago, which coincides with a time of increased competition for resources between predators and scavengers from this palaeocommunity.

Increasing evidence suggests that the European human settlement is older than 1.2 Ma. However, there is a fierce debate about the continuity or discontinuity of the early human settlement of Europe. In particular, evidence of human presence in the interval 0.7−0.5 Ma is scarce in comparison with evidence for the previous and later periods.

The environmental conditions at Sierra de Atapuerca in the early Middle Pleistocene, a period without evidence of human presence, are compared with the conditions in the previous period, for which a relatively intense human occupation is documented. A team from CENIEH has developed a mathematical model to compare the  available resources for a human population and the intensity of competition between secondary consumers during the two periods.

The Gran Dolina site TD8 level, dated to 0.7−0.6 Ma, is taken as representative of the period during which Atapuerca was apparently not occupied by humans. Conditions at TD8 are compared with those of the previous period, represented by the TD6-2 level, which has yielded abundant evidence of intense human occupation. The results show that survival opportunities for a hypothetical human population were lower at TD8 than they were at TD6-2. Increased resource competition between secondary consumers arises as a possible explanation for the absence of human occupation at Atapuerca in the early Middle Pleistocene

In this paper entitled “Discontinuity of Human Presence at Atapuerca during the Early Middle Pleistocene: A Matter of Ecological Competition?” other scientists from CENIEH, along with researchers of Universidad de Burgos, Gibraltar Museum, Universidad Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES) of Tarragona have participated