page_title: Spy Cave
section_title: Excavations
hierarchical_section_title: Spy Cave / Excavations
caption_attribution_description: English: Skull, Spy 2, found in 1886 in Belgian Spy, one of the main sites of enormous importance for the proof of the existence of the human species of Neanderthal.
context_page_description: Spy Cave is located near Spy in the municipality of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre, province of Namur, 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.
context_section_description: Since the first amateur investigations during the late 19th century numerous amateur and professional archaeologists have carried out excavations and removed all sediment deposits of the cave. In 1886 Neanderthal fossils of excellent quality were discovered, which contributed to the 19th century scientific community to occasion the paradigm shift and recognize the existing fossils Engis 2 and Neanderthal 1 and embrace the notion of the mutability of species in an evolutionary context. The excavation was conducted by Liège,  archaeologist Marcel de Puydt and geologist Max Lohest. Paleontologist and zoologist Julien Fraipont published the specimen description in the American Anthropologist journal.
  The assemblages of the oldest excavations have been mixed, that makes the interpretation of the palaeoenvironment difficult. In addition publications of de Puydt, Lohest and Fraipoint disagree on the number of layers of knapped flints. Nonetheless, it is assumed that there existed seven, possibly more, Paleolithic occupation sequences, three are attributed to Neanderthals and the Mousterian culture and four to Modern human Upper Paleolithic presence.
  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".
caption: The Spy 2 cranium
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