Archaeologists in northern Spain have uncovered thousands of stone tools and animal bones at a Neanderthal camp dating back roughly 46,000 years, shedding light on how these early humans lived along the Trema River in Burgos province.
This year’s excavation at the Prado Vargas cave, near the village of Cornejo within the Ojo Guareña karst system, expanded the dig by 32 square meters (344 square feet), bringing the total excavated area of the Neanderthal layer, known as level 4D, to 140 square meters (1,507 square feet).
That places Prado Vargas among the most extensively excavated Neanderthal cave sites known. The campaign was led by Alfonso Benito of the National Research Center on Human Evolution, Marta Navazo of the University of Burgos, and Rodrigo Alonso of the Museum of Human Evolution.
About twenty archaeologists and students from universities in Burgos, Cantabria and Madrid, along with Chile’s Austral University and its Natural History Museum, took part in the fieldwork.
Flint blades and butchered animal bones emerge from the dig
Excavators recovered more than 1,500 fossils and stone artifacts this summer, most concentrated near the cave entrance. About 95 percent of the lithic tools were made from flint, while the remainder were shaped from quartzite and quartz pebbles, mostly sharp-edged flakes, scrapers and notched pieces.
Among the animal remains were teeth and bone fragments from wild boar, horse, bison, aurochs, fallow deer and red deer. Many showed cut marks and signs of percussion, particularly on limb bones, indicating that Neanderthals butchered the animals and broke open long bones to extract marrow.
Excavators also found several bone retouchers this season, tools shaped from animal limb bones and used to sharpen stone implements. Combined with earlier discoveries, the site has now yielded around 100 such pieces, making Prado Vargas an important location for studying that technology.
Ancient tools and bones confirm a long-term Neanderthal camp
The abundance of tools and bones recovered this year supports the idea that level 4D functioned as a large Neanderthal camp, occupied for extended stretches between spring and autumn across multiple generations, researchers said.
The cave was later home to early Homo sapiens as well. Excavators this year completed work on more recent layers from the Upper Paleolithic, where a hearth found in 2025 was linked to some of the first Homo sapiens to settle in that part of inland Spain, with a preliminary date of about 35,000 years.
The findings confirm that Homo sapiens occupied the site after Neanderthals, during their broader expansion across western Eurasia, the excavation’s co-directors said.
Alongside the dig, a volunteer program held from August 10 to 14 along the Trema River had about fifty local residents and visitors wash and sieve roughly half a ton (1,102 pounds) of sediment from level 4, turning up remains of small rodents that will help researchers reconstruct the region’s Pleistocene climate.
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