I'm standing on a bunch of boring hills, on the edge of the high and dusty Castilian plains. This is the kind of Spain that tourists avoid.
Yet in archaeological terms this site is El Dorado. Because these hills of the Sierra Atapuerca have recently given up treasures which promise to change our ideas of human evolution - and the entire history of religion.
A few weeks back, for instance, the archaeologists in the so-called Elephant Pit found a humble human tooth. But it was a tooth with an ancestry: it was 1.2m years old.
Previously, the theory was that mankind evolved in Africa, and then fanned out across the world, about one million years ago. As part of this dispersal, man migrated northwards and westwards into Europe, maybe around 800,000-600,000BC.
But Atapuerca gives us incontrovertible evidence that there
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was human life, already in north Spain, in 1.2m years BC. Is it possible that the "out of Africa" theory is wrong - that mankind evolved separately in Europe?
No one knows. It's a revolutionary find. Yet Atapuerca's rich limestone silt hides still another secret, even more astonishing. As archaeologist Susana Callizo explains: "Sixty metres beneath us here is the Sima de los Huesos, the Pit of Bones. That's a cave where we have found 27 skeletons of Homo heidelbergensis, who lived here 300,000 years back."
She continues: "The question you have to ask is, how did those skeletons get down there? The Pit of Bones is inaccessible. Even today it is difficult to approach - the archaeologists have to abseil down a narrow chasm, then crawl through passages, before they can start digging. Some people think the
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