One of the most provocative recent scientific studies has attempted to determine How did the crossbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals occur?The sensationalized news in many media outlets claims that ancestral pairings primarily occurred between Neanderthal men and modern human women. However, in science, press headlines are not always a reliable reflection of scientific data, because they often seek social impact or clickbait

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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Between 130,000 and 172,000 years ago, a Neanderthal became trapped inside a cavity in Altamura (Apulia, Italy). Over the years, it remained uncovered by sediment and protected by a thin layer of calcite. This resulted in its exceptional preservation: even the delicate internal structures of the nose have been preserved. The skull, discovered in 1993, has never been moved, but it has been analyzed by a team of researchers from various Italian universities, the IPHES-BÚSQUEDA research group, and the Rovira i Virgili University (URV). Their conclusion is that the interior of the nasal cavity is not exceptional and does not explain why Neanderthals survived the final phases of the European Pleistocene, when the climate was frigid. However, their body proportions clearly reflect this adaptation. This is a debate that has lasted for decades within the scientific community. It was known that the nose was exceptional externally, but there was a theory that it might have had unique internal features within the nasal cavity (autapomorphies) that would have compensated for this apparent lack of external adaptation. "The nasal laminae and bony structures allow the air to be warmed before it reaches the lungs," explains Carlos Lorenzo, professor at the URV, researcher at IPHES-BÚSQUEDA, and co-author of the article. "With this study, we have been able to verify that these structures do not allow for a sufficiently complex pathway to explain the adaptation."

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"We didn't expect it," Jordi Rosell, the researcher leading the excavation campaign in the Toll and Teixoneres caves in Moià, tells ACN. He is referring to the discovery of a hearth in Teixoneres that is between 38,000 and 40,000 years old and corresponds to the "last Neanderthals." This discovery confirms that, in Moià, Neanderthals took a few thousand years longer to become extinct than in other parts of Europe.

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As a young man, he was passionate about Ancient Egypt, and his insatiable curiosity about the past eventually made him one of the fathers of paleogenetics, a discipline that studies human evolution through ancient DNA preserved in fossils. Biologist and geneticist Svante Pääbo (Stockholm, 1955) won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for having deciphered the genome of Neanderthals, a species extinct 30,000 years ago, a milestone that opened the door to research into the foundations of our genetic makeup. The researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology is in Barcelona this Monday to receive the fifth European Hypatia Science Prize, awarded by Barcelona City Council and the BCN Knowledge Hub of the European Academy.

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