Kicking off the 2023 field season!

This week we started the 2023 field season at Lapa do Picareiro.

Here’s some interesting facts about this cave:

  • Located in a mountainous terrain, it takes 1/2 hour hike in very rough and steep terrain for the team to get to the cave every day
  • On the other side of that mountain a group of researchers recently found a 400 thousand years old skull
  • The site was occupied for thousands of years during prehistoric times, including by some of the earliest Homo sapiens in western Iberia, around 40 thousand years ago
  • Current data shows that neanderthals also used the cave, and in the next few years our work will try to understand when and how their occupation took place
  • Ongoing research in the cave is a collaboration between a NSF funded project and the Finisterra ERC project funded by ERC Research.