For a hundred years El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian mountains was judged of no promise to science and used to keep goats

For a hundred years El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian mountains was judged of no promise to science and used to keep goats. In 1996 Lawrence Straus and Manuel González Morales began to dig at a spot abandoned since 1903, and over thirty years they drew out of this one cave finds dating back as much as forty thousand years. Here they found traces of the last Neanderthals and of the dwellers of the Bronze Age, a rock engraving, bone carvings, the first wheat in those parts, the bones of sheep, and metal. The chief find came in 2010 by pure intuition: Straus decided to dig behind an engraved slab at the back of the vestibule and stumbled upon the Red Lady, the skeleton of a middle-aged woman buried nineteen thousand years ago and strewn with ochre. Analysis of her DNA showed that the Ice Age populations of Europe had managed to meet and mingle before they settled the cooling north. The upshot was that the complete prehistoric archive of Iberia lay for a hundred years under goat dung, because knowledgeable people had foreseen in advance that there was nothing to look for there