Excavations at Prado Vargas Cave in northern Spain have expanded the exposed area of a Neanderthal occupation layer to 140 square meters. The 2026 field season added 32 square meters at sublevel 4D and produced more than 1,500 animal remains and stone tools, according to Phys.org Archaeology.
The cave is located in Cornejo, in Burgos province, within the Ojo Guareña karst complex. Sublevel 4D is estimated to be about 46,000 years old. Researchers interpret the growing concentration of evidence as support for the hypothesis that the layer represents a large Neanderthal camp, although that interpretation remains a research conclusion rather than a direct identification of the site’s function.
The excavation was co-directed by Alfonso Benito of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, Marta Navazo of the University of Burgos and Rodrigo Alonso of the Museum of Human Evolution. About 20 archaeologists and students participated, with teams from Spanish and Chilean universities and museums represented.
Work this summer concentrated on the cave entrance. Animal remains included teeth and bones from wild boar, horse, steppe bison, aurochs, fallow deer and red deer. Many limb bones carry cut marks or percussion traces. These marks are consistent with carcass processing and the breaking of long bones to obtain marrow.
Most of the stone tools—about 95%—were made from flint. The remainder used quartzite and quartz pebbles. Unretouched sharp flakes were the most common forms, followed by scrapers, notches and denticulates.
Several bone retouchers were among the season’s notable finds. These animal-bone fragments were used to shape and maintain stone-tool edges. Including examples recovered in earlier seasons, researchers have documented approximately 100 at Prado Vargas, making the site a significant source of evidence for this technological practice.
The excavation team proposes that Neanderthal groups occupied sublevel 4D repeatedly and for extended periods, mainly from spring through late autumn, over several generations. The cave was later used by Homo sapiens: younger sublevels 4A-AB date to the Upper Paleolithic, and a hearth found during the 2025 season has a preliminary age of about 35,000 years.
Community participants also washed and sorted roughly half a tonne of sediment from level 4. The work recovered small-mammal remains that researchers plan to use in reconstructing Late Pleistocene environmental conditions at Ojo Guareña.
