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One of the human fossils that have attracted the most attention was one uncovered in 1995 in a cave called Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca region of Spain by three Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University of Madrid. The fossil revealed the face of an 11-year-old boy who looked entirely like today’s man. Yet the child had died 800,000 years ago. This fossil even shook the convictions of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, who led the Gran Dolina excavation. Ferreras said:
Arsuaga Ferreras:
We expected something big, something large, something inflated-you know, something primitive... And what we found was a totally modern face. . .To me, this is most spectacular-these are the kinds of things that shake you. Finding something totally unexpected like that. Not finding fossils; finding fossils is unexpected too, and it's okay. But the most spectacular thing is finding something you thought belonged to the present, in the past. It's like finding something like a tape recorder in Gran Dolina. That would be very surprising. We don't expect cassettes and tape recorders in the Lower Pleistocene. Finding a modern face 800,000 years ago-it's the same thing. We were very surprised when we saw it.330