The Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) is celebrating White Night in Burgos for the sixth year, with free visits to the laboratories, and the launch of the podcast “Sapiens Dialogs”, which brings together researchers from the CENIEH and other renowned scientific centers to discuss topics of interest in human evolution, thanks to the collaboration of the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT) - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.

The first dialog, entitled “Atapuerca: past, present, and future”, will be published this Saturday, May 21st, at 11 pm, and two of the codirectors of the Atapuerca sites, Eudald Carbonell and José Mª Bermúdez de Castro, who is Paleobiology Program Coordinator at the CENIEH, will be present. These two heavyweights of human evolution will run through the last 40-plus years of excavations and give us a preview of the new surprises these World Heritage sites in Burgos may throw up.

The second dialog is also about Atapuerca, with the researchers Nohemi Sala, of the CENIEH, and Antonio Rodríguez Hidalgo, of the IPHES, who will mark the start of the Excavation Campaign 2022 by speaking of life and death in these Burgos mountains during the Pleistocene.

Full house

The CENIEH has already put up the “full house" sign for the guided visits, during which more than 250 people will pass through the facilities to see the main laboratories and their advanced equipment close up. They will also be able to discover the osteological collection of large mammals from the European Pleistocene, which includes spectacular reproductions like the skulls of a steppe bison and a scimitar-toothed cat, as well as complete original skeletons of a European bison and a hippopotamus.

The great novelty this year is the new Experimental Archaeology and Taphonomy Laboratory, where visitors will be able to see a live demonstration of knapping.