Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, butchered animal bones, the leftovers of their camps. What nobody had ever found in Navarre, the region of northern Spain whose capital is Pamplona, was a single bone of the people themselves. On Monday that changed, […]

The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi […]

When people talk about Neanderthal technology, they almost always mean stone: points, scrapers, flakes chipped from flint. There is a good reason for that. Stone can last hundreds of thousands of years, while a wooden stick buried in the ground rots away quickly. For decades, a large part of Neanderthal equipment has simply been missing […]

Deep inside Ojo Guareña, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neanderthal layer. This year’s season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer — known as level 4D — to […]

An international team of researchers has published a study that questions one of the most widespread theories about the disappearance of Neanderthals. According to their findings, climate change and the resulting fragmentation of habitats did not play a decisive role in the extinction of this human species, which occurred approximately 40,000 years ago. The work, […]