To access the cave, climbing is necessary.<\/p>\n
No path exists. There has never been a path. The Freser Valley in the eastern Pyrenees is now a safeguarded wilderness, and it was, in every significant way, wilderness five and a half millennia ago. Reaching Cova 338 \u2014 the archaeological label for the location \u2014 demands a steep hike lasting several hours, on foot, hauling everything you require up 2,235 meters of elevation, and bringing everything you discover back down.<\/p>\n
The contemporary archaeologists working at the site undertake this each excavation season. They transport their tools, their brushes, their sample bags, their shelters, their provisions, their bones. Then they bring their discoveries back down the route they ascended.<\/p>\n
What they are slowly uncovering, excavation by excavation, is that they are not the first individuals to have made this journey. They aren’t even the tenth generation. Prehistoric individuals were undertaking the same ascent to this cave 5,500 years ago, and they continued returning, for at least two millennia, on expeditions strategically planned and thoroughly supplied \u2014 carrying nothing anyone would have taken on a whim, going to a place nobody would have visited by chance.<\/p>\n
The reason for their visits, archaeologists believe, is that the cave housed something worth the climb. Small green stones. Likely malachite. They ascended to work with it, generation after generation, in fires they constructed inside the cave itself.<\/p>\n
The 23 hearths<\/p>\n
The Cova 338 excavation, directed by Professor Carlos Tornero of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), has been taking place for several years and gained international attention in early 2026 with the release of its discoveries in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.<\/p>\n
In the second and third occupation layers of the excavation, the team uncovered 23 hearths. Twenty-three distinct fireplaces, established at various times throughout the site\u2019s extensive history of use, each containing remnants of a specific green mineral. Approximately 200 fragments were recovered in total. Analysis indicates, though final validation is still ongoing, that the mineral is malachite \u2014 a copper carbonate that forms in striking green nodules and has been one of the primary source ores of metallic copper throughout human history.<\/p>\n
Importantly, the malachite fragments exhibit clear indications of thermal alteration. They have been purposefully heated. Other materials in the same archaeological layers \u2014 bone, wood charcoal, sediment \u2014 do not display the same alteration patterns.<\/p>\n
As co-author Dr. Julia Montes-Landa of the University of Granada expressed in the study announcement: \u201cMany of these fragments are thermally altered, while other materials in the cave are not, which clearly indicates that fire played a significant role in their processing and that there was a deliberate intention behind it. In other words, they weren\u2019t burned by accident.\u201d<\/p>\n
What they were doing (carefully framed)<\/p>\n
It is essential, when discussing a site like this, to articulate what the evidence genuinely supports rather than romanticise it.<\/p>\n
What Cova 338 clearly does not confirm is that prehistoric individuals were smelting copper at 2,235 meters of elevation. Copper smelting necessitates sustained temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius, specific reducing conditions, and equipment that the site does not appear to have possessed. The researchers themselves employ the terms \u201cexploitation\u201d and \u201cprocessing\u201d throughout their published paper, not \u201csmelting.\u201d The distinction is significant.<\/p>\n
What the site strongly implies is that prehistoric communities were intentionally ascending to this altitude, repeatedly for centuries, to work with a copper-bearing mineral using fire. Whether they were heat-treating the stones to make them easier to crush, roasting them as a preparation for later processing at lower elevations, or attempting some form of early metallurgy that didn\u2019t achieve the production of metallic copper, is still being investigated.<\/p>\n
The paper describes the site as \u201camong the earliest known examples of this type of activity in Western Europe.\u201d That is a careful, precise assertion. It doesn\u2019t require the archaeologists to demonstrate more than they can. And it is genuinely groundbreaking, because prior to Cova 338, the standard belief in Pyrenean archaeology was that high-altitude locations above 2,000 meters were essentially marginal \u2014 sites prehistoric groups passed through momentarily during seasonal migrations but did not utilize for organized, resource-intensive activities.<\/p>\n
Cova 338 challenges that belief. Twenty-three hearths, distributed across occupation layers spanning roughly two thousand years, all containing evidence of the same intentional processing activity \u2014 this is not incidental use. This is a site people visited intentionally. Repeatedly. For an extended period.<\/p>\n
The child<\/p>\n
In addition to the evidence of copper, the team uncovered something else.<\/p>\n
In the third layer of the excavation, nestled among the ancient fireplaces and the charred green stones, they discovered a baby tooth and a finger bone, both belonging to a child who passed away at around eleven years of age. Whether the two bones originate from the same<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To access the cave, climbing is necessary. No path exists. There has never been a path. The Freser Valley in the eastern Pyrenees is now a safeguarded wilderness, and it was, in every significant way, wilderness five and a half millennia ago. Reaching Cova 338 \u2014 the archaeological label for the location \u2014 demands a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":373652,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-373651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/373652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}