The oldest human skull ever discovered in Portugal, 400,000 years old and found in the Aroeira cave, is on display for the first time as the centrepiece of the new museum in Torres Novas, the municipality where it was discovered in 2014.
“It was imperative for us to be able to do it here. We managed to have it displayed for the first time in Torres Novas and we created the necessary conditions for that to happen, because it was found in Torres Novas and, for us, as a municipality, it is extremely important,” said Elvira Sequeira, Councillor for Culture of the Torres Novas City Council, to the Portuguese Agency.
The mayor stressed that the municipality has “absolutely extraordinary remains that are important to highlight and show to the world.”
The oldest human fossil found to date in Portugal, the “Crânio da Aroeira”, was excavated by archaeologist João Zilhão in the archaeological complex of the Almonda spring karst system.
This 400,000-year-old human skull is “one of the few from that period found in the world” and “the oldest human fossil found to date in Portugal,” according to the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage (DGPC).
A human fossil from the Middle Pleistocene, which covers the period between 2.5 million years ago and 11.5 thousand years ago, had never been found in such a western location in Europe, making this “the oldest fossil found in Portuguese territory and one of the oldest in Europe,” João Zilhão told Lusa.
The archaeological find was the subject of “study and restoration work” at the Complutense University of Madrid, by a team led by Juan Luis Arsuaga, and was delivered in 2018 to the National Archaeological Museum, where it remains to this day.
Filipa Rodrigues, head of the Torreja museum and part of the team of archaeologists at the time of the discovery, stressed to Lusa the importance of the “find”, emphasizing that, “in itself, the identification of human skulls or fossils of this age is a rare event” throughout the world.
“This skull is extremely important, both from the point of view of the study of human evolution, due to its morphological characteristics, but above all because of the archaeological site where it was identified and the entire context that allows for a multidisciplinary study of the characteristics of this period, that is, the tools used by the humans who occupied that place and the fauna they hunted.” he added.
This is an ancestor “halfway between Homo erectus, which appeared in Africa between 1.5 and two million years ago, and the most recent ones, which we call Neanderthals in Europe and modern in Africa,” having been found in this cave, where archaeologists have been working for more than 30 years.
The site of the find “has the potential, due to the geological conditions, to contain traces from all periods of the last half million years,” and animal remains and stone tools, such as axes, were also found in the Aroeira cave.
The fossil, recovered in 2014, was removed from the site embedded in a single block of sediment and taken to a research center in Spain, where experts managed to separate it after two years of work.
The “Cerca da Vila” museum centre, inaugurated this month, is structured in three different spaces under the motto “A river, a territory, a human history”, with an exhibition of archaeological finds from Prehistory (400,000 years) to the end of the Middle Ages (15th century), with the “Crânio da Aroeira” being the starting point for the dissemination of the history of human evolution.
Source: Observadora
