Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Research into ancient hunter-gatherer populations of the Iberian Peninsula has mainly focused on coastal regions, with relatively little investigation into the inland.

A classic hypothesis has been that the cold and dry conditions of inland Iberia would have been too harsh for such populations to inhabit during the coldest periods of the Last Glacial, but recent findings have begun to challenge this view.

Credit: Adobe Stock – Microgen

However, according to a new study, Paleolithic human populations survived even in the coldest and driest upland parts of Spain.

In this study, researchers report new evidence for high-alтιтude human occupation from the Upper Paleolithic of Spain.

This evidence comes from a site called Charco Verde II, located in the Guadalajara province. This site is situated over 1,000 meters above sea level, in one of the coldest regions of Spain. Despite this, the abundance of tools and ornaments at the site reveals a recurring sequence of human occupation between around 21,000 and 15,000 years ago. This time span is especially notable since it includes two of the coldest periods of the Last Glacial.

View from the top of the Charco Verde II archeological deposit during the 2021 excavation season. Credit: Aragoncillo-del Río et al., 2023, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0

This discovery further challenges the idea that Upper Paleolithic humans avoided inland Iberia due to its harsh climate, and instead shows that the inland hosted complex and relatively dense settlements even during very cold and arid periods.

See also: More Archaeology News

These findings add to the growing evidence for Middle and Upper Paleolithic occupations throughout this region, altogether indicating that the historic lack of evidence for hunter-gatherer sites in inland Iberia is not an accurate reflection of prehistoric human distributions, but instead a result of modern research hitherto prioritizing study of coastal regions and neglecting the inland.

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE

Written by Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com Staff