"Game of Thrones in the Pleistocene” at the Faculty of Biosciences

Juan Luis Arsuaga is professor in the Palaeontology Department of the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humano. The world-renowned palaeoanthropologist will offer a conference on the “Game of Thrones in the Pleistocene”, in which he will speak on the discoveries made at the Atapuerca site, considered to be the prehistoric site with the greatest amount of hominid remains from the Pleistocene period, from two million to ten thousand years ago. Arsuaga will speak on how the research conducted in the past thirty years in the Atapuerca Mountains and the advances made in different disciplines related to his research, such as biology, are shedding light on the ability to recreate the origin, antiquity and evolution of hominids in Europe, and discover the life and natural environment surrounding our first ancestors.

Juan Luis Arsuaga is member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US and the Spanish Royal Academy of Doctors. He is co-director of the excavations in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos), Cueva del Conde (Asturias) and Pinilla del Valle (Madrid). Throughout his career, he has published over eighty papers in scientific journals including the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR), Nature, Science and PNAS. He is also author of nine books such as La especie elegida, The Neanderthal's Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers and El enigma de la esfinge.