Sites

Spy

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Site type:
Cave
Lat/Long:
50.48, 4.66
Country:
Belgium
Classifications:
Homo neanderthalensis
Cultures:
Mousterian
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Spy Cave (French: Grotte de Spy) is located in Wallonia near Spy in the municipality of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre, Namur Province, Belgium above the left bank of the Orneau River. Classified as a premier Heritage site of the Walloon Region, the location ranks among the most significant paleolithic sites in Europe. The cave consists of numerous small chambers and corridors.

The hominid skeletons discovered during the first excavations have been named Spy I, thought to be a female, and Spy 2, a young male. These were dated to around 36,000 years BP (34,000 BC), although a Bayesian analysis in 2014 concluded that they were probably more than 40,000 years old. The identification of the remains of a Neanderthal child, Spy VI, was published in 2010. The identification was made from an analysis of the mandibular remains and the child is thought to have died at about 18 months, "making the Spy Neandertal remains the youngest ever directly dated in northwest Europe." A paper in Anthropologica et Præhistorica states that the original excavators at Spy did not believe that the remains were deliberately buried in graves but that this hypothesis is "now widely accepted".