Sidrón Cave

The Sidrón Cave is a non-carboniferous limestone karst cave system located in the Piloña municipality of Asturias, northwestern Spain, where Paleolithic rock art and the fossils of more than a dozen Neanderthals were found. The total length of this huge complex is approximately 3700m, which contains a central hall of 200m length and the Neanderthal fossil site, called the Ossuary Gallery, which is 28m long and 12m wide. Declared a "Partial Natural Reserve" in 1995, the site serves as a retreat for five species of bats and is the place of discovery of two species of Coleoptera .SiteGalería del OsarioThe human remains were found accidentally in 1994, all within a single layer . The age of these remains of three men, three adolescent boys, three women, and three infants has been estimated to about 49,000 years. The fact that the bones are excellently preserved with very limited erosion and no large carnivore tooth marks and the unusual deposition of the bones, mixed into a jumble of gravel and mud, suggests that these Neanderthals did not die in this spot but an exterior location. A number of scenarios of how these "members of an extended family" might have ended up in a 6m2 room-sized space, dubbed the Tunnel of Bones included flooding, cave collapse, and disposal by cannibals. Projection exists that they were dropped into the cave in a single event via a collapse of nearby fissures above the site or, by influx of storm water.