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Around 19,000 years ago, a woman from a group of hunter-gatherers died and was buried in a cave in northern Spain. In 1996, archaeologists started exploring the cave, finding abundant evidence of prehistoric people and their activities. In 2010,...

As far back as 45,000 years ago, groups of hunter-gatherers lived in what is now called El Mirón Cave near the northern coast of Spain. First discovered for science in 1903 by local archaeologists and surveyed by University of New Mexico Professor of...

Around 19,000 years ago, a woman ̶ possibly a woman of some special status ̶ from a group of hunter-gatherers died and was buried in El Mirón Cave in northern Spain. In 1996, archaeologists started exploring the cave, finding abundant evidence of prehistoric people.

For nearly two decades, University of New Mexico Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Lawrence G. Straus, his colleague Manuel R. Gonzalez Morales from the University of Cantabria and their students have spent part of every summer in Spain, in a cave that once held penned goats. They have been searching for a glimpse of the inhabitants who lived in this part of the world between 40 and 3,000 years ago.

In a world where news travels instantly and interpreted on the fly, it’s hard to grasp the slow and careful work of archeologists. Lawrence Straus, UNM Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology,...

The team excavated the remaining deposits in the area where 19,000 year-old human remains had been found in 2010-11 and found about 10 more hand and foot bones from the adult woman whose bones and jaw had been collected by her band or family members after flesh decomposition, then stained with red ochre and reburied during the Lower Magdalenian period.