Alfonso Benito Calvo

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• PhD
• Researcher at National Research Center on Human Evolution

Geodiversity is a landscape characteristic related to the heterogeneity of the physical properties of the earth surface. In this work, we quantify and compare geodiversity in several geodynamic zones of the Iberian Peninsula. For this purpose, we have developed a geographic information system (GIS) procedure to carry out a regional terrain classifi...

Stone tool use by wild chimpanzees of West Africa offers a unique opportunity to explore the evolutionary roots of technology during human evolution. However, detailed analyses of chimpanzee stone artifacts are still lacking, thus precluding a comparison with the earliest archaeological record. This paper presents the first systematic study of ston...

The Sierra de Atapuerca is an anticlinal ridge of Mesozoic carbonate rocks on the NW edge of the Iberian Chain (Northern Spain, Burgos), surrounded by subhorizontal continental sediments of the NE Duero Cenozoic Basin under endorheic conditions. The shift to exorheic conditions in the Duero Basin lead to the onset of an episodic downcutting phase a...

Pleistocene fluvial incision acceleration resulting in narrow and deeply entrenched valleys has been widely described and is generally attributed to uplift rate increase or greater climatic severity. In this paper, the long-term downcutting pattern of the Upper Ebro River and driving mechanisms are assessed, and we reconstruct the valley incision r...

La Cova Gran de Santa Linya presenta un palimpsesto de ocupaciones neolíticas que transcurren durante más de 2000 años. La superposición de contextos arqueológicos de diferentes momentos en un mismo espacio dificulta su estudio a nivel diacrónico. Sin embargo, es posible determinar la cronología de estos mediante el estudio de las producciones cerá...

The Tagus Basin, located in the central Iberian Peninsula and shared by Spain and Portugal, represents a pivotal region for understanding the interplay between paleo-environmental processes and past human living and adaption. The Tagus River, the longest in the Iberian Peninsula, originates from the transition of the Cenozoic basins from an endorhe...

Recent evidence indicates that the emergence of stone tool technology occurred before the appearance of the genus Homo¹ and may potentially be traced back deep into the primate evolutionary line². Conversely, osseous technologies are apparently exclusive of later hominins from approximately 2 million years ago (Ma)3,4, whereas the earliest systemat...

Collecting is a form of leisure, and even a passion, consisting of collecting, preserving and displaying objects. When we look for its origin in the literature, we are taken back to “the appearance of writing and the fixing of knowledge”, specifically with the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (7th century BC, Mesopotamia), and his fondness for collecting...

The earliest archaeological evidence from northern Africa dates to ca. 2.44 Ma. Nevertheless, the palaeoenvironmental setting of hominins living in this part of the continent at the Plio-Pleistocene transition remains poorly documented, particularly in comparison to eastern and southern Africa. The Guefaït-4 fossil site in eastern Morocco sheds lig...

Spatial analyses are characterized by the use of multiple and diverse tools to analyze data from all the different disciplines that converge in the study of a site. With these tools and data, spatial studies aim to infer the processes, both cultural and natural, that have intervened in the formation of a deposit and its preservation until the time...

The Early Upper Paleolithic Level 497D of Cova Gran (Pre-Pyrenees, Spain) comprises large assemblages of lithics, fauna, hearths, ash accumulations and well-preserved refitting sequences. This provides exceptional information to analyze spatial patterns and deepen our understanding of the socio-economic behavior of these human groups. This large in...

The arrival, occupation, and disappearance of Neanderthals in the Cantabrian region is the subject of a long-running debate that continues to this day. Knowledge of the evolution of Neanderthal societies since the end of the Middle Pleistocene in the north of the Iberian Peninsula is greatly impacted by the scarcity of a good chronological framewor...

In this paper, we present the site of Valdeprovedo (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos), an open-air Paleolithic site. This site is attractive for study and research for three main reasons. First, it is an open-air site with an extraordinarily well-preserved lithic assemblage that corresponds to a very short-lived event. Second, in this small area, refits...

Understanding the relationship between Neanderthal groups and their environment and they it is essential to comprehending their ways of life. In this article, we use both zooarchaeology and taphonomy to study the fauna assemblages found in Level 4 of Prado Vargas Cave (Cornejo, Burgos, Spain). The results point to a site in which the main accumulat...

The discovery of Tahya 3 (Guefaït) represents a significant breakthrough in our understanding of Homo sapiens occupations during the Late Pleistocene period in Eastern Morocco. This new open-air site holds great promise for shedding light on the activities, lifestyle, and cultural practices of our ancient human ancestors. By reformulating our knowl...

Boxgrove is a key locale for our understanding of Middle Pleistocene human behaviour in Northwestern Europe. It provides high-resolution evidence for behaviour at scale in fine-grained sediments, dating from the end of the MIS13 interglacial at around 480,000 years ago. Excavations at this site in the last quarter of the twentieth century have prov...

Hotel California is part of a network of open-air Neanderthal sites located in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain). In this study, we examine the technology of the lithic assemblages recovered from this site's archaeological levels 3 to 7, which are characterised by the use of local raw materials, non-hierarchical centripetal exploitation syste...

San Quirce is an open‐air archaeological site situated on a fluvial terrace in the Duero basin (Palencia, northern Iberia). This paper presents new and consistent chronologies obtained for the sedimentary sequence using post‐infrared infrared stimulated luminescence (pIR‐IR) dating of K‐feldspars and single‐grain thermally transferred optically sti...

Gran Dolina is a cavity infilled by at least 25 m of Pleistocene sediments divided into 12 lithostratigraphic units and 19 sedimentary facies. These sedimentary facies have been divided into allochthonous facies, defined as sediment inputs from the outside, and autochthonous facies, defined as sediments generated within the karst; but this division...

The Ojo Guareña karst system (OG) is located in the SE Cantabrian Range in northern Spain (Burgos, Spain). It is a multilevel cave system composed of 6 levels and is one of the longest cavities in the Iberian Peninsula (110 km). The spatial patterns and geomorphological characteristics of OG constitute a first-order record for studying the principa...

The Cueva del Silo is part of the lower karst level of the Cueva Mayor-Cueva del Silo karst system (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain), whose evolution has preserved an impressive archeo-paleoanthropological sequence since the Early Pleistocene. Cueva del Silo is remarkable for the presence of fluvial deposits that record the entry of the Arlanzón...

Core reduction provides insight into the technical actions involved in knapping sequences, one of the central elements in technological analysis. By examining reduction phases, cognitive and operational aspects of the management of lithic resources can be explored, and the technical behaviours of human groups reconstructed. This paper presents a te...

The detailed description of processing workflows in Structure from Motion (SfM) surveys using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is not common in geomorphological research. One of the aspects frequently overlooked in photogrammetric reconstruction is image characteristics. In this context, the present study aims to determine whether the format or prop...

The Châtelperronian open-air site of Aranbaltza II presents a set of very particular characteristics, such as the large number of well-preserved lithic materials in a small area and the presence of lobular accumulations that represents the 33% of different size and shape of lithic materials of the whole assemblage. Through the application of densit...

Multiple factors have been proposed to explain the disappearance of Neandertals between ca. 50 and 40 kyr BP. Central to these discussions has been the identification of new techno-cultural complexes that overlap with the period of Neandertal demise in Europe. One such complex is the Châtelperronian, which extends from the Paris Basin to the Northe...

The isotopic composition of hydrogen in authigenic minerals is a useful tool to reconstruct past paleo-environments. Clay minerals are an important component of authigenic minerals in soils and sediments but they usually occur with other compounds that must be eliminated before the analysis, such as organic matter and carbonates. Thus, various "pre...

The Aïn Beni Mathar – Guefaït (ABM-GFT) region in Eastern Morocco is the object of anarchaeological, palaeontological, geological and geochronological research project, led by an interna-tional team since 2006. The research in this former fluvio-lacustrine basin, roughly 2000 km2, hasrevealed a significant number of Pleistocene and Holocene sites....

In the Iberian Peninsula there are many Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites with long sequences, especially in the northern, Mediterranean and Atlantic regions. However, it is remarkable the scarcity of human fossil record for this period. Most of the (scarce) fossils consist in cranio-dental remains, but just a few preserve postcranial Homo sap...

Most biogeographers considered the Maghreb to be part of the Palearctic biogeographic region, though it is relatively recently that the proportion of Palearctic species increased there. How and when exactly these biogeographic changes occurred is not well understood, but they are probably the result of the increasing aridification of the Sahara and...

The Early Stone Age record preserves a rich behavioural signature of hominin stone tool making and use. The role of percussive technology in the daily subsistence strategies of our earliest ancestors has seen renewed focus recently. Studies of modern primate tool use highlight the diverse range of behaviours potentially associated with percussive t...

There are functional differences related to the peculiarities of each settlement. The material used to manufacture tools is one of the key factors in the analysis of use-wear traces in traceological studies. An experiment was conducted to test the development of these functional traces in two types of flints found at two Middle Palaeolithic settlem...

The open-air site of Boxgrove (ca. 500 ka) is one of the most important sites for understanding the European Acheulean technology, due to the extraordinary preservation of the lithic assemblage that allows analyzing shaping strategies and handaxes morphological variability (Pope, 2002; Emery, 2006; García-Medrano et al., 2018). The sequence of Boxg...

Spatial analysis studies in Palaeolithic archaeology arise as indispensable research tools for understanding archaeopalaeontological sites. In general terms, spatial studies have been specialised in the description of the distribution of materials and in the definition of accumulation areas, with the aim of distinguishing intentional activities or...

MNK Skull is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Olduvai Gorge, particularly due to the previous discovery of human fossils referred to in the paper where the Homo habilis taxon was originally defined. An important archaeological assemblage is contained in the same horizon as the hominin fossils, constituting the last evidence of bo...

Sinkhole subsidence damage on transportation infrastructure is a particularly problematic hazard that has rapidly increased in numerous karst regions worldwide. The quantitative characterization of the deformation is fundamental for the design of effective mitigation measures and to prevent potential accidents. Nonetheless, there is a limited numbe...

In order to better understand the causes and geographic patterns of Neanderthal demise it is necessary to broaden the focus of existing Neanderthal studies to include new sites from understudied regions, particularly those containing multi-level fossil and lithic records, and to improve regional-scale Neanderthal extinction frameworks using multipl...

In 1969, members of Grupo Espeleológico Edelweiss discovered the Sala and Galerías de las Huellas in Ojo Guareña Cave system (Burgos, Spain). These contained hundreds of ancient human footprints, preserved in the soft sediment on the floor. These footprints represent the tracks of a small group of people who walked barefoot through these complex pa...

p class="VARAbstract">During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, numerous museums, scientific societies, and royal academies were founded in Europe and America. In this scenario, the Anthropological Museum Montané was founded in Havana, Cuba. Its collection has grown over the years, thanks to researchers, antiquarians, and amateurs....

During the course of the excavations of the San Quirce open-air archaeological site in Spain, an unusual negative structure was identified in the Holocene level dated ca. sixth millennium cal BC. A fire pit alongside a single post-hole and intense fire-burning activity was recorded. Yet, the most striking feature of the structure is the absence of...

En este trabajo se hace una presentación de las investigaciones arqueológicas desarrolladas en el yacimiento de Aranbaltza (Barrika, Bizkaia), uno de los escasos yacimientos paleolíticos al aire libre conservados en la región cantábrica. Su registro es especialmente rico en ocupaciones realizadas por grupos de neandertales, desde finales del Pleist...

The Aïn Beni Mathar-Guefaït Basin is located in the High Plateau Region (E Morocco). Along the northern margin of the basin, the upper Za River, which is the main eastern tributary of the Moulouya – the largest catchment in Morocco, incises more than 150 meters into Plio-Pleistocene sediments. The main goal of our study is to provide a geochronolog...

The High Plateaus Basin is an important region to understand landscape evolution and human occupation in North Africa during the Quaternary. We focused on the Gara Soultana area, applying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, photogrammetry and a submeter Global Navigation Satellite System, for large scale geomorphological mapping. This work in the upper Moulo...

Our understanding of the emergence and dispersal of the earliest tool-making hominins has been revolutionised in the last decade, with sites in eastern Africa and China pushing records of both events several hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought. In recent years, climate and environmental factors have been considered by many as pri...

Los índices morfométricos son descritos como herramientas útiles para comprender la evolución geodinámica de diferentes regiones geológicas, aunque suelen aplicarse considerando sólo la geometría actual de las formas del relieve. En este trabajo, hemos combinado una cartografía geomorfológica detallada & algunos de los índices y variables morfométr...

The open-air site of Boxgrove (ca. 480 ka) is one of the most important sites for understanding the European Acheulean technology (Roberts and Parfitt 1999), due to the extraordinary preservation of the lithic assemblage that allows analyzing shaping strategies and handaxes morphological variability (Pope, 2002; Emery, 2006; García-Medrano et al.,...

Fuente Mudarra is on a gentle slope on the left bank of the Pico River, near Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain. A 12−m ² test pit was dug at this large open-air site between 2012 and 2017. Several upper Pleistocene archaeological levels were documented. Results from Fuente Mudarra confirm that Neanderthal groups, little represented at cave sites,...

The advantages of active massive data capture devices such as LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) in the creation of high-resolution topographic models have been well known for years. They have been widely applied to the documentation of cultural heritage since the beginning of the 21st century. As LiDAR devices, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) sy...

Late Cenozoic landscape evolution in intracratonic basins represents an illustrative example of the interaction between surface processes, climate, lithologic and tectonics factors. Here, we model the transition from endorheic to exorheic conditions for the intracratonic Madrid Basin (Tagus Basin, Central Spain). During the Late Cenozoic, this basi...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The archaeological evidence from Cova Gran de Santa Linya suggests that during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, the site was used as a livestock enclosure where the accumulated excrements were burned, generating a sequence known by the term fumier. Here we present the results of an integrated study of silica phytoliths, dung spherulites, an...

The High Plateaus Basin is an important region to understand landscape evolution and human occupation in North Africa during the Quaternary. We focused on the Gara Soultana area, applying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, photogrammetry and a submeter Global Navigation Satellite System, for large scale geomorphological mapping. This work in the upper Moulo...

The Level VII of Amalda I cave (Gipuzkoa, Spain) represents one of the latest Middle Palaeolithic occupations in the Cantabrian Region. It is characterized by the presence of Middle Palaeolithic lithic industry and animal remains, with clear evidences of anthropic and carnivore manipulation. At this site, the Neanderthal presence has been questione...

Landscape evolution studies enable us to understand site formation processes affecting past hunter-gatherer settlements. This work presents a landscape reconstruction of Roca dels Bous site (RB), which is a reference site for the Late Mousterian occupation of the incised valleys of the southeastern Pyrenees. For this purpose, we combined geomorphol...

Actualment assistim a un interès renovat per estudiar la presència humana al Prepirineu, àrea clàssica en el marc de la prehistòria a Catalunya. El projecte “Poblament humà al Prepirineu oriental”, coordinat des del CEPAP de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, és un projecte transversal, que té com a objectiu reconstruir el poblament prehistòric...

The identification of short-term occupations is a key topic in the discussion of prehistoric hunter-gatherers settlement patterns. These short-stays can conceal a rich behavioural and organizational record. However, the effect of site formation processes hampers the individualization of spatio/temporal clusters in the archaeological record. Level 4...

Understanding site formation processes is crucial for interpreting archaeological context patterns and hominin behaviour as these affect the preserved condition of a site and the integrity of archaeological remains. The fluvio‐lacustrine sequences in the Nihewan Basin of North China are rich sources of early Pleistocene archaeological sites, which...

Freehand and bipolar experimental knapping of quartzite from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania is used to conduct spatial analysis of artefact distributions using GIS techniques, and to investigate the orientation of refit lines using circular histograms. The aim of our study is to discern patterns that can be applied to the archaeological record in two do...

Laminar knapping is a system of methods through which a recurrent series of elongated and morphometrically repetitive blanks are obtained. The appearance of this method is associated with cognitive changes that foster different paleoanthropological discussions. This article assesses the implications of the 497D lithic assemblage of Cova Gran (North...

The need to apply sinkhole remediation and monitoring programs is increasing, concurrently with the rising engineering impacts of sinkholes in many regions. However, there is a significant gap in the scientific literature regarding the assessment of the performance of remedial works through subsidence monitoring. Monitoring techniques have experien...

The term “Mental Template” has been used frequently, especially in discussions about Acheulean handaxes. Nevertheless, the standardization of shape not only affects handaxes but also cleavers. The aim is to analyze the whole sense of the cleaver tool-type through the study of the quartzite cleavers of the Middle Pleistocene sites of Gran Dolina -TD...

Surface morphometry comprises a relevant set of techniques that provide objective tools to identify, map, and understand use wear patterns in stone tools. Thus far, these techniques have been applied mainly to 2D or 2.5D data, but their application to 3D 360° data is promising and still underdeveloped. Here, we apply new 3D techniques to calculate...

This study aims to characterize forest landscapes during the Late Middle Paleolithic (LMP), Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) and Magdalenian of the NE Iberian Upper Pleistocene. In this paper we present the results of anthracological analyses from Cova Gran (Santa Linya, Spain). Results show a dominance of Pinus sylvestris type suggesting that despite...

Cova Gran de Santa Linya chrono-cultural sequence results from the excavations undertaken in three different sectors -Ramp, Transition and Platform-, which have yielded over 40 AMS 14C dates. The earliest occupations documented are assigned to the Middle Palaeolithic period, overlayed by early Upper Palaeolithic units in the Ramp sector. This seque...

Last 30 years, the first foothills of the Southern Pyrenees have become a privileged place to analyze the Neanderthal settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. Beside the current number of caves and rock shelters attributed to Middle Paleolithic located in the Marginal/ Exterior Sierras of Lleida and Huesca; it should be added the new site of Abric Piza...

La Roca dels Bous (Camarasa, Lleida) is an archaeological occupations related to Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal final. The systematic study of material remains and archaeological context corresponding units archaeological N10 and N12 detect changes in the behaviour of the occupants of the rockshelter. These results characterize the techno-economic...

This work explores, for the first time, the application of a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) and a comparison of point clouds in the 4D monitoring of active sinkholes. The approach is tested in three highly-active sinkholes related to the dissolution of salt-bearing evaporites overlain by unconsolidated alluvium. The sinkholes are located in urbani...

The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Western Europe is a central topic in current paleoanthropological research. Recently, Neanderthal survival during MIS 3 and the emergence of anatomically modern humans have been the focus of much discussion in Iberia. Here, we analyse the stratigraphic and contextual resolution of the S1B/497D archaeo...

The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Western Europe is a central topic in current paleoanthropological research. Recently, Neanderthal survival during MIS 3 and the emergence of anatomically modern humans have been the focus of much discussion in Iberia. Here, we analyse the stratigraphic and contextual resolution of the S1B/497D archaeo...

The Sierra de Atapuerca karst is an interesting inactive multilevel cave system, which is the result of the action of ancient base levels during the Plio-Pleistocene. It contains one of the most important prehistoric sites for the understanding of old settlements in Eurasia, and was listed by the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. These caves were...

The Arlanzón river is located in the NE Duero Depression (Castilian Plateau of northern Spain), where it drains the anticlinal ridge of the Sierra de Atapuerca, where a rich record of karstic and open air Palaeolithic archaeological sites are located, spanning the last 1.22 Ma. The geomorphological sequence of this valley is composedof fourteen flu...

Investigations dealing with subsidence monitoring in active sinkholes are very scarce, especially when compared with other ground instability phenomena like landslides. This is largely related to the catastrophic behaviour that typifies most sinkholes in carbonate karst areas. Active subsidence in five sinkholes up to ca. 500 m across has been quan...

The Aïn Beni Mathar-Guefaït basin provides a long stratigraphic sequence and a faunal record that covers the Early and Middle Pleistocene. During the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, a fluvio-lacustrine basin developed in the area. This landscape has been occupied by hominin developing a Mode 1 technology. This fluvio-lacustrine basin has its final...

En los últimos 15 años, las tecnologías 3D se han convertido en grandes herramientas para la documentación y preservación de registros arqueológicos (Doneus et al., 2005), ya sea para fines divulgativos, didácticos o científicos. El análisis tradicional in-situ de lugares de interés cultural, se ha visto modificado por la posibilidad de obtener rep...

El complejo kárstico multinivel de Ojo Guareña se encuentra localizado en la Cordillera Cantábrica, al norte de la provincia de Burgos. En su tercer nivel se hallan las Galerías de las Huellas, donde se han conservado de manera intacta múltiples rastros de huellas humanas pertenecientes al Paleolítico Superior (Ortega et al., 2013). Estas huellas s...

We present a new method to assess use-wear formation processes of pounding tools used to break bones based on a combination of conventional microscopy, optical 3D surface measurements obtained with a confocal microscope and GIS analysis. The method involves 3D alignment and 3D surface change inspection techniques along with a surface morphometric c...

The effect of post-depositional processes on the formation of Plio-Pleistocene sites at Olduvai Gorge is the subject of considerable debate, due mainly to its implications for the behavioral interpretation of the Beds I and II assemblages. In light of this debate, here we contribute to the discussion that investigates the role of water flow in site...

The Galería de las Huellas site (Burgos, Spain) is located in the third level of the Ojo Guareña Multilevel karstic system, in two passages which floors preserve several tracks of Palaeolithic human footprints. They are preserved on unconsolidated and wet loam sediments, very sensitive to any physical approach to document and study their geometry a...

The Sierra de Atapuerca is an anticlinal ridge of Mesozoic carbonate rocks on the NW edge of the Iberian Chain (Northern Spain, Burgos), surrounded by subhorizontal continental sediments of the NE Duero Cenozoic Basin under endorheic conditions. The shift to exorheic conditions in the Duero Basin lead to the onset of an episodic downcutting phase a...