Juan Luis Arsuaga

Who is Juan Luis Arsuaga?

Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras obtained a master degree and a doctorate in Biological Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he is professor in the Paleontology Department of the Faculty of Geological Sciences.

As a child he already showed a great interest in prehistory after reading Quest for Fire and visiting a dig in nearby Bilbao.

Arsuaga is a visiting professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University College of London and since 1982 he has been a member of the Research Team investigating Pleistocene deposits in the Atapuerca Mountains. He has been a co-director since 1991 with José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell Roura of the Atapuerca Team, which was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research and the Castilla León Prize for the Social Sciences and Humanities, both in 1997.

The finds at Atapuerca have shed new light on the first humans in Europe. This contrasts with the secretive atmosphere surrounding the digs to near Orce, in southern Spain, which has yielded tools indicating human presence that predate the finds at Atapuerca. In 2013, Arsuaga co-authored a paper which reported the finding of the oldest human DNA ever, dating back 400,000 years. The mitochondrial DNA that stemmed from a fossil found in a cave in Sima de los Huesos had similarities to mitochondrial genomes previously found in the extinct Denisovans in Siberia.