Empty Spanish highlands in the Ice Age? They were looking in the wrong places

New study reveals evidence of human presence in one of the coldest and most inhospitable areas of prehistoric Spain.

It was a widespread idea a decade ago: icy plateaus and windswept in the heart of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain, they were abandoned during a last Ice Age.

It was believed that the region’s harsh continental climate and high altitude — an average of 600 meters above sea level — would have led prehistoric hunter-gatherers to migrate to milder coastal areas.

But now one appears contradicts this idea and reveals evidence of human presence in one of the coldest and most inhospitable areas of prehistoric Spain.

Researchers have discovered several Paleolithic sites in the eastern highlands of Iberian Plateau, an elevated, rugged region that until now was believed to have been uninhabited during the Late Pleistocene, between about 120,000 and 11,700 years ago.

Evidence suggests that human groups not only arrived to these high-altitude environments, but used recurrently, even during the most rigorous phases of the last Ice Age.

Until recently, the scarcity of archaeological remains in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula was interpreted as evidence that the region was too hostile to support prehistoric life. However, the study authors suspected another explanation: Perhaps the investigators never looked in the most appropriate places.

Based on previous work on the Green Puddle IIwhich revealed human occupation between 21,400 and 15,100 years ago, the team launched a systematic survey and excavation campaign along the river basin that divides the Tagus and Ebro rivers, in the Castilian branch of the Iberian System.

Although winter temperatures frequently drop below zero for five months a year, the work identified four new locations with clear evidence of human activity, describes the .

Em Big Cave, at an altitude of 1,250 meters, excavations carried out between 2022 and 2023 revealed stone tools, animal bones and charcoal remains. Radiocarbon dating places the occupation at around 13,500 years old, at the end of the Magdalenian period, with small flint instruments characteristic of late Ice Age hunter-gatherers.

The rock shelter of The Forestpreviously used as a corral, presented a thin archaeological layer with remains of flint and bones, indicating a specific human presence between the end of the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic, between 12,500 and 4,500 years ago.

Em Black Gird, at the confluence of a tributary of the Tea, four stratigraphic layers were identified, including a trace of a fireplace and a burin, a stone tool for working bone or wood, suggesting late Upper Paleolithic or early Holocene occupation. Another surface find with 36 flint and quartz artefacts, including scrapers and denticulated tools, points to a much earlier occupation, associated with Neanderthals between 300,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The researchers emphasize that these discoveries are not isolated cases, but indicate that human occupation in the interior of the Peninsula during the late Pleistocene was more frequent than previously thought.

Evidence also suggests that these territories continued to be used during the Holocene, reinforcing the dynamic role of the Iberian interior in human prehistory.