About them we say that they are the best friend we can have. Loyal, helpful, empathetic, affectionate, they occupy a very special place in the history of humanity and are the most common pet in our homes. And yet, we still don't know since when, where, or how dogs stopped being wolves to become inseparable companions. Now two new studies published in Nature get a little closer to solving this mystery.

In the municipality of La Canonja, in Tarragonès, Europe's most remote past takes shape in a new facility that looks towards the future. The Mammuthus SpaceThe interpretation center dedicated to the Barranco de la Boella archaeological site, which opened last summer, features a museum-style approach that combines immersive technology, original artifacts, and experiences designed to bring prehistory closer to the general public. Located in the Mas del Hort del Abeurador, in a natural setting at the entrance to the municipality, the new facility occupies approximately 1,000 square meters and has a clear ambition: to preserve, study, and disseminate information about one of the most important sites for understanding the origins of human presence in Europe. A key site for understanding the first Europeans

The Barranco de la Boella ravine has been known since the late 19th century, but systematic excavations have been carried out since 2007 by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-BÚSQUEDA). The research has revealed a collection of fossil remains and tools dating back more than a million years, a period that is poorly documented in Europe. The scientific work is directed by researchers Palmira Saladié and Josep Vallverdú, who have led the excavations and study of the site for almost two decades. The findings have contributed to rethinking the paradigm of human dispersal in Europe, demonstrating that the first populations arrived much earlier than previously thought. Among the recovered materials are remains of up to 29 animal species, including mammoth tusks, hippopotamus bones, and stone tools associated with the first hominins who inhabited this area of ​​the Camp de Tarragona region.

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It's not just a theory; a scientific team from the University of Barcelona and the University of Alcalá has been able to prove it by tracing the trail of cut stone tools recovered from the Peña Capón site (Muriel/Tamajón, Guadalajara): 25,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherers of the Peña Capón area. The researchers followed the trail of flint tools that different groups of hunter-gatherers exchanged over the years and found evidence that the stones traveled a distance of about 700 kilometers. They originated in the area where Saint-Sulpice-de-Excideuil and Mauprévoir are located today, in the Dordogne department of southwestern France, and ended up at Peña Capón, in the center of the Iberian Peninsula. The authors of the study argue that the social networks reached an area of ​​nearly 89,000 square kilometers. The tools would have been exchanged between interconnected groups. "One of these pieces traveled inside a leather bag and was not used for hunting or cutting. That's why we believe it had symbolic value," says Marta Sánchez de la Torre, professor at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the article published in the journal Science AdvancesThe tools would have been used to strengthen social alliances and maintain contact between different groups during the Last Glacial Maximum, when conditions were very harsh due to extreme cold and food scarcity. "We have also been able to verify, at other sites such as Montlleó, in the municipality of Prats i Sansor, in the Cerdanya region, that the colder it was and the worse the conditions, the greater the interconnection and exchange," says Sánchez. "There was not only an exchange of tools, but also of people, and that was key to the survival of these groups, which were quite small, usually consisting of 20 or 30 people," he adds.

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Shorter, less robust, and with proportionally longer and stronger arms than theHomo erectusThat's how it is.Homo habilisThe skeleton, named KNM-ER 64061, lived more than 2 million years ago in East Turkana, northern Kenya. It is the most complete skeleton of this hominid, which predated theHomo erectus and which has many anatomical features similar to later species. KNM-ER 64061 measured 160 centimeters in height and weighed between 30.7 and 32.7 kilograms.

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It has been generally believed that the first whalers came from the Northern Hemisphere and threw their harpoons into icy seas. They took the risk because they lacked many natural resources and, if they didn't want to starve, they had few alternatives. New research presents a different story. According to the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the UAB's Department of Prehistory, indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first documented evidence in Arctic and Pacific societies. Specifically, these intrepid whalers came from Babitonga Bay in southern Brazil. "They were probably young men seeking social recognition and increased prestige. They shouldn't have ventured too far out to sea, because southern right whales, for example, come very close to the shore," says André Carlo Colonese, who co-authored the article with Krista McGrath, published this Friday in the magazine. Nature Communications"The most likely hypothesis is that they went hunting in boats made from a single log, sometimes more than five or seven meters long, which could carry about thirty people, and they must have set out in groups," Colonese explains. They threw harpoons and waited for the whale, exhausted, to drown. "To prevent it from sinking, they most likely used floats made from the intestines of large animals," he adds. To document and demonstrate that whales were already being hunted on the coasts of Brazil more than 5,000 years ago, researchers have followed the trail of the sambaquis, the monumental mounds of shells that these Holocene societies built along the coast. They have analyzed hundreds of cetacean bone remains from these small mountains, which are more than 6,000 years old and could reach 30 meters in height. "Many mounds have disappeared because, from colonization until the 1960s, when the first heritage protection laws were enacted, they were looted primarily for lime production," explains Colonese. Fortunately, some pioneering archaeologists, such as the German Guilherme Tiburtius, saved part of this ancestral heritage, which is currently preserved in the Sambaquis Archaeological Museum in Joinville, Brazil. The sambaquis contained the remains of southern right whales, humpback whales, blue whales, northern right whales, sperm whales, and dolphins, many with clear cut marks associated with butchering. Large harpoons made of whalebone have also been found, some of the largest discovered in South America.

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The African, rather than Eurasian, origin ofHomo sapiens The theory of Africa as the birthplace of humankind is gaining traction following the description and dating of fossil remains found at a site in Casablanca, Morocco, which provide new evidence. This is the conclusion of a study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and published this Wednesday in the magazine Nature

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Neanderthals were the last humans on Earth who were not like us, and they remain a great enigma. Sometimes, it's even difficult to find the right words to describe what a Neanderthal is. For more than thirty years, at archaeological sites within the municipality of Alcoy, different teams have been trying to find answers to some of these questions: they study the tools they used and how they interacted with their environment to understand their mental structure, their cognitive abilities, their way of life, and their relationship with nature. "Our research project is profoundly transforming the traditional image of Neanderthals because we have been able to analyze, with an unprecedented level of detail, the behavior of the last Neanderthal populations before their disappearance," explains Cristo Hernández Gómez, who, along with Carolina Mallol Duque of the University of La Laguna, leads the project. Around time. Interdisciplinary investigations at the Neanderthal sites of Salt and Abric del PastorThe research won the IV Palarq National Prize for Archaeology and Paleontology, the highest private award in Spain dedicated to these disciplines. "The key to this advance lies in a multi-scale approach, which combines macroscopic analysis of the archaeological record with microscopic studies of sediments and investigations at the molecular scale. This approach allows us to separate human occupations that are very close in time, which until now appeared mixed together, and to reconstruct Neanderthal behavior on a temporal scale. "In just 3 centimeters of sediment, there can be millennia of history. We try to dissect and analyze what came first, what came later, and what corresponds to each occupation," he adds. The hearths are a window to the past

With this excavation at El Salto and Abric del Pastor, where the last Neanderthals lived before disappearing from the Iberian Peninsula, researchers have detected changes in mobility strategies, the use of raw materials, and the organization of domestic space. "The level of preservation is extraordinary," says Hernández. The researchers have been able to distinguish between heterogeneous groups that never interacted and that moved throughout the Serpis River basin, which crosses the regions of L'Alcoià, El Comtat, and La Safor, between 40,000 and 80,000 years ago. The lithic production provides many clues about what activities they carried out and where they carried them out, as well as what they left behind at their camps and what they took with them on their journeys. The campfires have provided a great deal of information about the Neanderthal diet.They fed mainly on adult horses, deer, and goats, and did not eat their young to ensure the survival of the species. They had a deep understanding of the environment and animal behavior. "The hearths are a window to the past, allowing us to understand how they organized themselves in their environment; they didn't always engage in the same activities. In some periods, tasks related to food and butchering predominated, while in others, craft-like activities are detected," explains Hernández. The hearths have also allowed researchers to define occupations, which tended to be brief, since the time elapsed between one hearth and another can be determined.

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If Jean-Jacques Annaud were filming now In search of fireThe story of a group of Neanderthals desperately searching for fire, which they knew how to maintain but not create, should rewrite the script. A team of researchers led by the British Museum has found evidence in Barnham (UK) that hominins were already capable of making fires more than 400,000 years ago. They did so repeatedly and in a controlled manner during the Lower Paleolithic, long before the appearance of humans. Homo sapiensUntil now, the oldest evidence of the ability to control fire dated back some 50,000 years and had been found in northern France. The research has been published in an article in Nature.

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What were the hands of ancient hominids like? And what could our ancestors have done with them? Analysis of fossils found in northern Kenya has shed some more light on these questions. These are the remains of a hand from Paranthropus boisei, one of the four species of hominids –along with theHomo habilis, heHomo rudolfensisand theHomo erectus– that coexisted in East Africa between 2 and 1 million years ago. Analysis of this primate's bones has revealed that it had grip strength similar to that of gorillas and tool-making skills similar to that of humans.

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The Alt Empordà is the region with the largest number of prehistoric sites in Catalonia. Hundreds of dolmens and megalithic remains, used as burial sites by primitive civilizations, are preserved, scattered throughout the natural surroundings of the Albera region and the Empordà plain. Now, a new discovery of great historical value has been discovered: the Bufadors dolmen, in the heart of the Cap de Creus Natural Park, just over an hour's walk from Port de la Selva, towards Cadaqués. It measures about four meters long by one and a half meters high and dates from the late Neolithic period, around 2700 BC.

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The sculpture of the Boxer is more than 2,500 years old, but it remains imposing. It is made of limestone, measures more than two meters and weighs about 300 kilos. Between the 9th and 8th centuries BC, it stood guard, along with other stone giants representing archers and warriors, over the necropolis of Mont'e Prama (Sardinia), where 125 tombs have been found, mostly of young men with traces of having carried out intense physical activity. The Boxer, discovered in 1974, survived the destruction by the Carthaginians in the 5th century BC and can now be seen in the Archaeological Museum of Catalonia (MAC), within the exhibition Megalithic Island"We're still excavating, but we don't have answers to many questions. Do they represent the buried warriors? Do they evoke mythical ancestors? Do they commemorate an important event?" asks Anthony Muroni, director of the Mont'e Prama Foundation and a specialist in megalithism (the use of large stones) that were originally used to build the giants. The dolmens used to build the giants were originally located more than 18 kilometers from the necropolis. Megalithism (the use of large stones) is still part of the Sardinian landscape. Across the island, 240 funerary dolmens are preserved. At the MAC, you can see different representations of the mother goddess and bulls. The nurges are a key feature of the Sardinian landscape: an estimated 7,000 were built between 1800 and 1150 BC. Many legends have been built around them, and in some places they are called fairy houses. Settlements sprang up around them, as can be seen in a recreation at the museum.

This Nuragic civilization had no hierarchy when it came to burying their dead. Giants' tombs are collective graves built between 1800 and 1000 BC. More than 800 have been documented, and when viewed from above, they resemble a cow's head. "Aristotle wrote that incubation ceremonies were held at the entrance to these tombs; the sick had dreams in which the deities answered their questions," Boya states. The exhibition also visits sanctuaries dedicated to the worship of water, where community and tribal gatherings took place around sacred wells. You can see bronze votive offerings placed in the sanctuaries by the sargos, depicting a ship, a warrior with two shields, and a seated woman with a child. At that time, Sardinia must have been a prosperous island. "We know that as early as 4,000 BC, they were already exporting to other parts of the Mediterranean and that it was a prosperous island thanks to its obsidian deposits," says the director of the MAC.

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Until recently, it was thought that the remote islands of the Mediterranean had been uninhabited until the arrival of the first farmers and ranchers. Research published in the journal Nature The study, led by Eleanor Scerri, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (Germany) and the University of Malta, with the participation of Ethel Allué and Aitor Burguet-Coca from IPHES-BÚSQUEDA and the Rovira i Virgili University (URV), documents a voyage for the first time. According to the study's authors, this voyage was carried out using "dug-out canoes without sails." The navigators oriented themselves using the stars, ocean currents, and coastal landmarks.

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June 30, 2022, at the Elephant Pit site in Atapuerca (Burgos), the fossil of the left side of the face of a hominid that lived between 1.1 and 1.4 million years ago was found. More than two years later, researchers from the Atapuerca Research Project have been able to partially reconstruct the face of this adult individual, whom they have named Pink, a tribute by anthropologists Eudald Carbonell and José María Bermúdez de Castro to the musical group Pink Floyd. "When we unearthed it, we thought it would be a Homo antecessor But that wasn't the case; it belongs to an earlier species. The discovery changes the story we had about prehistory," says Rosa Huguet, the researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-BÚSQUEDA) who led the study published in Nature. Pink would be the oldest hominid located so far in Western Europe.

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The first fossils ofHomo erectus were discovered on the island of Java in the late 19th century. Since then, more have appeared in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. And the more we know, the more similarities are found between this robust, lung-capacity species and modern hominids. The latest research confirms thatHomo erectus, which inhabited the Earth between two million years ago and the end of the Pleistocene, was more intelligent and much more adept at adapting and surviving in different environments and in a changing world than previously thought.

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