Joan Riera doesn't stand still. The world is very large, as is his curiosity. When he speaks with ARA, he already has a trip to Equatorial Guinea ready to trace the steps of the Spanish colonial era and interact with the local population. Then he leaves for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This anthropologist from Vallès has specialized in studying and visiting isolated communities. "My father had a great interest in African art and its influence on contemporary art. And this led us to go to Cameroon when I was young. We established a relationship with those countries, to the point that my father would end up buying a house and staying there to live," he explains. It would be logical to think that it was during those periods in Africa that he decided he would be an anthropologist. But listening to himself, Joan has discovered that it is not exactly like that. "I believe that my love for anthropology, for other people and the worlds that end up being born thanks to my grandmother. A farmer's daughter who raised me as a child in a farmhouse in Cerdanyola, in Collserola. She used to tell me stories of a rural Catalonia that I no longer knew. I believe that those nights in her bed listening to what she told me, whether they were tales or lessons on how to know the land, were key." An umbilical cord connects a Catalan farmhouse with the rituals of populations living very isolated in southern Sudan, one of the trips Joan was most eager to take. And which he has finally been able to do and it has moved him.

Scientists from the University of Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University have revealed a new secret in the history of the human species: they have found traces from two unknown ancestral lineages in human DNA. These are lineages we did not inherit from Neanderthals or Denisovans, but rather from older species. However, their appearance, where they lived, or which species they belonged to are questions still without an answer.

On the eleventh day of each month, at eleven at night, a small community gathers at the Hotel Bruc, at the foot of the Montserrat mountain. The establishment has recently become popular for its appearance in the series La Mesías, but the meeting is much older. For over forty years, a group of people has been punctually attending before heading towards a discreet spot in the mountain range. Once there, they observe the dark, starry sky with the hope of seeing something: a strange light, an inexplicable phenomenon, some sign of extraterrestrial life.

The anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra Murià (Mexico City, 1942) is an authority in Latin America in the field of social sciences. Son of the poet Agustí Bartra and the writer Anna Murià, he was born and raised on the other side of the Atlantic, far from Catalonia, due to the forced exile of his parents, persecuted by Francoism. Throughout his life, in Mexico, but also in Venezuela, the United States, London, and Paris, he has forged a career as a professor and intellectual, with notable contributions in areas such as exile or the construction of national identity. This week he is in Girona, invited by the Ferrater Mora Chair of the University of Girona (UdG), to give five lectures at the Faculty of Arts and a conference open to the public, on Thursday at the Centre Cultural La Mercè, on exile and travel.

The puzzle of the enigmatic lineage of the Denisovans, an extinct group of hominids that coexisted with Neanderthals over time – they were even related and are considered distant cousins due to their genetic differences – and that has left its mark on the genome of modern humans. The last identified piece of this ancestor is a Pleistocene male jaw fossil that a fisherman rescued from the seabed in what is now Penghu Channel, on the island of Taiwan, 17 years ago. This discovery shows that the Denisovan It managed to survive in the cold mountains of Siberia and Tibet, but also in warm and humid latitudes of East Asia. The study, published in the journal Science, also allows us to delve deeper into the characteristics that these archaic ancestors shared and that differentiate them from Neanderthals.