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.