The Wandering Ape

The Neanderthal is the most famous of our extinct human relatives. Few people don't know the name, but fewer still know what their daily lives were like in the midst of the Ice Age. Thanks to an incredible number of scientific discoveries in recent decades, we now have a much clearer picture. The day we learned that we had shared the planet with other humans, 167 years ago, a campaign began to differentiate them from us. The first known Neanderthal skeletal remains, which gave them their name, were discovered in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856. For nearly 150 years, Neanderthals were differentiated from Homo sapiens in every way possible. However, in the past 20 years, the amount of knowledge we have acquired about them, both through fossil and archaeological discoveries and through the sequencing of their DNA, has allowed experts to understand what their daily lives were really like. Neanderthals were skilled hunters and gatherers of a wide variety of foods. They controlled f

Thanks to the tooth of a hunter-gatherer who lived 23,000 years ago in Granada, Spain, it has been shown that the Iberian Peninsula was the last refuge of the first settlers of Europe during the coldest period of the Last Ice Age. The first Homo sapiens settlers of Europe arrived in an initial wave about 45,000 years ago, already well into the Last Ice Age. For about 15,000 years they were colonizing the continent, without too many problems. But between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago, all that was left of them was a small enclave in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Already the bones, and the technological styles of stone tools, seemed to indicate to experts that all of southern Europe had functioned as a refuge during the so-called Glacial Maximum, the coldest and harshest period of the last Ice Age. But new discoveries point in the other direction. In particular, the analysis of the genes of an individual discovered in the Cueva del Malalmuerzo, in the Granada area of Spain. This huma

In the coming years, the planet could experience a catastrophic climate change, so abrupt that no adaptation would be possible. The rapid melting of the continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere is altering the system of ocean currents that regulate the global climate. This has already happened in the past, related to the disappearance of the Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago. Seen from space, Earth is nothing more than a pale blue dot, as described by the renowned scientist Carl Sagan. If we get closer, we see water everywhere. Blue and liquid in the oceans, white and solid in the polar ice caps, and white again in the vapor of the clouds. Seawater, which covers 75 percent of the planet's surface, appears placid. But up close, movement is evident, both the vapor of the atmosphere and the liquid of the oceans and continental ice sheets. It is a dance between the atmosphere and the oceans that circulates seawater around the globe, generating heat and nutrient circulation t

The Altamira cave is a benchmark in world Paleolithic art. It was the first evidence of prehistoric art to be discovered, and having been inhabited for some 25,000 years, it covers almost all styles of cave painting, which is why it is known as the "encyclopedia of Paleolithic art". It leaves no one indifferent, not even in the past, as its discovery generated a controversy that would last for decades. A narrow crevice on the side of a small hill, 120 meters above the Saja river valley. That's what the tenant Modesto Cubillas saw in 1868 when he was following his dog during an afternoon's hunt. That crevice led to the cave that would later be called Altamira, located in Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain. Sealed from the outside for who knows how long, it is believed that it was the detonations from a nearby quarry that opened the crevice through which Cubillas' dog entered. The tenant did not get to see the paintings, but he told the owner of the land, Marcelin

If we were to travel back in time 2 million years, we would find the earliest representatives of the human genus in Africa. We could see that they had adapted to a highly mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle, walking kilometers and kilometers a day. A lifestyle that humans have maintained for 1,987,000 of the 2,000,000 years we have been on this planet. If we pay attention to these two large numbers, we will see that there is only a difference of about 13,000 years. These are the last years of human history, which have been lived in a radically different lifestyle. This radical change was brought about by the adoption of agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, which began to appear about 13,000 years ago, independently in different parts of the world. This small modification in the way of subsistence drastically changed the history of the human genus. Mainly because of the dependence it placed on us on the foods we chose to domesticate, just a handful, compared to the high va

The average adult spends between 50 and 70 percent of their life sitting, and few spend the rest of that time doing any physical activity. If we were to get into a time machine to observe our ancestors from about ten thousand years ago, we could see that their customs were exactly the opposite. They spent more than 70 percent of their time active.  Many of the characteristics and behaviors that made us more fit in the past now make us maladapted, because the environment in which the human genus emerged has changed so much, and so quickly that it is remarkable that we can continue to live as we do. The irony is that the greatest agent of change in our environment is ourselves. Let's get back in the time machine and go back 1.5 million years. We are in Africa, in a region of grasslands and isolated patches of trees. It is a tropical region, the climate is warm, and the sun rarely gives us a break by hiding behind a cloud. As good time travelers, we have brought sunscreen, bug spray,