El Rincón-1 site provides new evidence on hyenas and early European horses

The excavation campaign is funded by the 2026 grants programme for Archaeological and Palaeontological Heritage Research in Castilla-La Mancha. Research at El Rincón-1 resumed in 2018 after a hiatus of more than thirty years and has since produced more tan 2000 fossils of Lower Pleistocene mammals, including gazelles, giant deer, equids, rhinoceroses, hyenas, giant cheetahs, lynxes and sabre-toothed felids.

Among the most important discoveries of the latest campaign is the recovery of more than 70 hyena coprolites, some of them grouped in what may represent latrine areas. These remains are expected to provide valuable information for reconstructing the diet and behaviour of these carnivores and for improving our understanding of the ecosystems that inhabited the region more than 2.5 million years ago.

The campaign also yielded a cranial fragment and a complete mandible of the equid Equus livenzovensis. The significance of these remains lies in the fact that El Rincón-1 had not previously provided lower dentition from this species. Furthermore, the horse population documented at the site represents one of the oldest known occurrences of the genus Equus in Europe, making these fossils a key reference for studying the evolutionary history of modern horses.

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