Juan Manuel Jiménez-Arenas

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Granada

Since the discovery of Venta Micena in 1976 until now, the Orce archaeopalaeontological sites (Guadix Baza basin) in the northern part of Granada have contributed significantly to the body of knowledge on Early Pleistocene ecosystem dynamics. The exceptional fossil accumulation at Venta Micena stands out, housing important examples of early Pleisto...

El yacimiento de Fuente Nueva-3 (FN3) forma parte del conjunto arqueo-paleontológico del Pleistoceno Inferior de la cuenca de Guadix-Baza (Granada), localizado en el municipio de Orce. Las asociaciones de roedores permiten situar el yacimiento en la biozona de Allophaiomys aff. lavocati (ca. 1,4-1,07 Ma), lo que es consistente con el resultado de s...

Meat consumption by early hominins is a hotly debated issue. A key question concerns their access to large mammal carcasses, including megafauna. Currently, the evidence of anthropic cut marks on proboscidean bones older than -or close to- 1.0 Ma are restricted to the archaeological sites of Dmanisi (Georgia), Olduvai (Tanzania), Gona (Ethiopia), O...

Barranco Le on (Orce, Guadix Baza, Spain) is one of the sites with the oldest evidence of human activity in southwestern Europe. This site has yielded human remains in association with both fauna and lithic artefacts, linked through the presence of anthropogenic cut and percussion marks. Nevertheless, while this site is a clear example of early hom...

The Orce Archaeological area (province of Granada, southeastern Spain) includes several fossiliferous sites of late Pliocene and early Pleistocene age (Fig. 1). Two of them, Barranco León (at 1.4 Ma) and Fuente Nueva 3 (at 1.2 Ma) provided the oldest hominin evidences from southwestern Europe and this fact put the area to center of a scientific...

In this paper, a new genus and species of arvicolid rodent is described from the late early Pleistocene levels of the sections of Fuente Nueva 3 (Guadix-Baza Basin, Granada, southern Iberian Peninsula), and Quibas (Murcia, southeastern Iberian Peninsula). The majority of Manchenomys n. gen. molars lacks roots, and the morphology of the first lower...

In this paper, we describe and discuss emergent digital technologies employed for monitoring the excavations at the archaeological site of Barranco León (Granada, Spain) between 2017 and 2020. The method entails the following material requirements: a total station, a conventional camera, a computer and a software that integrates photogrammetry algo...

The Early Pleistocene archeopaleontological sites of Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 (Granada, Spain), dated respectively to 1.4 and 1.2 Ma, have yielded rich micro- and macro-vertebrate assemblages. The faunal list of amphibians and reptiles in both sites is composed by a total of 14 species: seven anurans (Discoglossus sp., Pelobates cultripes,...

The Guadix-Baza Basin (GBB, Granada, Spain) extends over a surface area of some 4.500 km2 and constitutes one of the richest Pleistocene vertebrate fossil records in Western Europe. Within this basin, Orce area stands out for having yielded evidence on of the oldest hominin presence in western Eurasia. Exceptionally rich collections of stone tools...

Palynological investigations in the Orce Archaeological Zone (OAZ) (Guadix-Baza Basin, Granada, Spain), Venta Micena 1 (VM1), Barranco León (BL) and Fuente Nueva 3 (FN3) are presented. This archaeological region is connected with the first Homo populations in Western Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene. The VM1 pollen record is characterized by Ep...

Determining the cause and nature of the postmortem processes that living organisms experience is one of the main common issues faced by forensic experts, zooarchaeologists, palaeontologists, and other specialists. Carnivores are among the most destructive agents that can interact with a corpse, since their feeding behaviour can lead to very extensi...

Little is known about the subsistence practices of the first European settlers, mainly due to the shortage of archaeological sites in Europe older than a million years. This article contributes to the knowledge of the subsistence of the first Europeans with new zooarchaeology and taphonomic data from the Palaeolithic site of Barranco León (Orce, Gr...

Situated in southern Spain’s Guadix-Baza basin, Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 (Orce, Andalusia, Spain) are two of the most important western European Oldowan archeological sites. After 30 years of quasi-uninterrupted excavations, these two occurrences have yielded exceptional lithic and faunal records in precisely dated stratigraphic situations,...

Over the last few decades, several types of evidence such as presence of hominin remains, lithic assemblages, and bones with anthropogenic surface modifications have demonstrated that early human communities inhabited the European subcontinent prior to the Jaramillo Subchron (1.07–0.98 Ma). While most studies have focused primarily on early Europea...

Despite the paleontological relevance of the terrestrial Early Pleistocene Venta Micena bonebed (Baza Basin, Spain), it lacks a comprehensive geochemical/sedimentological study. Here, we demonstrate that the 1.5-m-thick Venta Micena limestone formed in a relatively small freshwater wetland/pond located at the periphery of the large saline Baza pale...

Amphibians are considered excellent indicators of ecological and climatic changes with a remarkable phenotypic plasticity. The study of such adaptative capacities is central to understanding the climate and environmental changes that occurred during the Early-Middle Pleistocene Transition, at around 1.2 Ma, when the persistence of subtropical ecosy...

La gestación de este libro no ha sido fácil. En buena medida, por la complejidad del amor. Este concepto ha sido abordado por múltiples disciplinas académicas y artísticas a lo largo de la Historia de la Humanidad y, por tanto, ha participado y se ha visto influido por los modelosepistemológicos y ontológicos predominantes. De entre ellos destacan...

The Guadix-Baza Basin (GBB) in Andalucía, Spain, comprises palaeontological and archaeological sites dating from the Early Pliocene to the Middle Pleistocene, including some of the earliest sites with evidence for the presence of early humans (Homo sp.) in Europe. Thus, the history of climate and environments in this basin contributes significantly...

Venta Micena is an area containing several palaeontological sites marking the beginning of the Calabrian stage (Early Pleistocene). The richness of the fossil accumulation including species of Asian, African and European origin, makes Venta Micena a key site for the the palaeoecological and palaeoenvironmental study of southern Europe during the Ea...

Barranco León (Orce, Andalusia, Spain) provides the oldest case of knapping and percussive activities on an ancient raw material reservoir deposit. This site has already proven to be one of the oldest and most significant Oldowan open-air sites in Europe (1.4 Ma), with an exceptionally rich flint and limestone lithic assemblage, in association with...

Archaeological remains have highlighted the fact that the interglacial Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 was a threshold from the perspective of hominin evolution in Europe. After the MIS 12 glaciation, considered one of the major climate-driven crises experienced by hominins, the archaeological records show an increasing number of occupations, evidenc...

Se presenta un proyecto de innovación docente que ha tenido como principal objetivo favorecer un aprendizaje significativo mediante el uso de una metodolo-gía participativa y multidireccional, con implicación de profesorado y alumnado, para elaborar un recurso educativo. Como resultado de este proyecto se ha elabo-rado una línea del tiempo en vinil...

El objetivo del estudio es contribuir, desde la doble perspectiva de la paz imperfecta y del giro epistemológico, a revisar críticamente el concepto de poder como base para la agencia pacifista. Originalidad: este trabajo se centra, por primera vez, en la agencia como posibilidad para que la paz ocupe cada vez un mayor espacio personal, público y p...

A key question in human evolution concerns the circumstances that led to the first dispersal of Homo across Eurasia. The so-called Savannahstan or savanna hypothesis argues that early Homo adaptation was relatively inflexible and that these hominins were closely tied to savanna and grassland environments. Consequently, hominins would have taken adv...

The Early Pleistocene sites of Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 (Guadix-Baza Basin, SE Spain) have yielded abundant Oldowan lithic artifacts and one hominin tooth (Homo sp. in level D1 or D2 of Barranco León), today considered to be among the earliest evidence for a hominin presence in Western Europe, at ca. 1.4–1.2 Ma. Here, for the first time, th...

In this work, we present new paleoenvironmental reconstructions for Barranco León (Guadix-Baza Basin, SE Spain), an Early Pleistocene archaeo-palaeontological site nowadays considered one of the earliest sites with hominin evidences in western Europe (ca. 1.4 Ma). Paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been done within a more detailed stratigraphi...

Las identidades o, para ser más imprecisos, las relaciones de pertenencia son una característica que es perceptible en todas las entidades humanas; tradicionalmente, se ha planteado su naturaleza diferenciadora y excluyente. No obstante, desde la investigación para la paz —concretamente desde la doble perspectiva de la paz imperfecta y los giros ep...

En este trabajo se resumen los estudios llevados a cabo en los distintos yacimientos arqueopa-leontológicos de Orce durante las últimas décadas, haciendo especial hincapié en los resultados obtenidos a raíz de las últimas campañas de excavación (2017-2020), enmarcadas en el Proyecto General de Investigación «Primeras ocupaciones humanas y contexto...

Remote sensing is a useful tool for the documentation of archaeological sites. The products derived from a photogrammetric project applied to archaeology such as orthophotos and three-dimensional virtual reconstruction (3DVR), allow for detailed study of the Fuente Nueva 3 site in Orce. In our study of the Fuente Nueva 3 site in Orce, we used 3DVR...

Lumbar lordosis is a key element of the upright posture, being interpreted as a consequence of bipedal locomotion. There is consensus that the generic modern human pattern of metameric vertebral body wedging is sexually dimorphic in modern humans. However, recently published studies have compared this pattern with other hominins, such as Neandertha...

The Early Pleistocene sites of Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 (Guadix-Baza Basin, SW Spain) have yielded abundant Oldowan lithic artifacts and one hominin tooth (Homo sp. in layer D of Barranco León), today considered to be among the earliest evidence for hominin presence in Western Europe, at ca. 1.4-1.2 Ma. Here, for the first time, the stratig...

The lithic assemblage of Barranco León (BL), attributed to the Oldowan techno-complex, contributes valuable information to reconstruct behavioral patterning of the first hominins to disperse into Western Europe. This archaic stone tool assemblage comprises two, very different groups of tools, made from distinct raw materials. On the one hand, a sma...

The lithic assemblage of Barranco León (BL), attributed to the Oldowan techno-complex, contributes valuable information to reconstruct behavioral patterning of the first hominins to disperse into Western Europe. This archaic stone tool assemblage comprises two, very different groups of tools, made from distinct raw materials. On the one hand, a sma...

Hitherto unpublished ¹⁴ C and ²³⁰ Th[sbnd] ²³⁴ U determinations from Carihuela Cave (Granada province, Andalusia, Spain) raise a possibility of late survival here of Neanderthals and their Mousterian technocomplex into an advanced stage of the Late Pleistocene (MIS-3), when anatomically-modern humans with Upper Palaeolithic toolkits were penetratin...

Anurans are represented by four species (Discoglossus cf. jeanneae, Pelobates cultripes, Bufo bufo s.l. and Pelophylax cf. perezi), while squamates include four lizards (Chalcides cf. bedriagai, Timon cf. lepidus, indeterminate small lacertids and cf. Dopasia) and five snakes (Coronella girondica, Natrix maura, Natrix natrix s.l., Rhinechis scalari...

During several consecutive excavations from the 1950s to the 1990s the cave of Carigüela de Píñar (Granada, Baetic System, Southeast of the Iberian Peninsula) has yielded an important sample of Neanderthal fossils. Among these finds is a fragmentary frontal bone of an immature individual (CE-05877), which was described earlier. Here we present a ne...

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula.We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming.We reveal sporadic contacts be...

Desde su formulación en 1982 el enfoque de la ética del cuidado ha contribuido significativamente, junto con otros desarrollos teóricos, a un cambio de paradigma. Un gran número de evidencias provenientes de la psicología evolutiva, la antropología, la arqueología o la primatología, entre otros campos, están arrojando una nueva luz sobre el concept...

Aunque son numerosos los informes y trabajos de investigación para la paz que recurren a la estadística, la cuantía se ve significativamente reducida si atendemos a las publicaciones que incluyen a la estadística inferencial. En este artículo pretendemos usarla para modelizar el vínculo entre diferentes indicadores de paz y violencia con el objetiv...

The pattern of the varying climatic conditions in southern Europe over the last million years is well known from isotope studies on deep-ocean sediment cores and the long pollen records that have been produced for lacustrine and marine sedimentary sequences from Greece, Italy and the Iberian margin. However, although relative glacial and interglaci...

Esta línea del tiempo ha sido elaborada en el marco del proyecto “Todo en su tiempo”. Una línea del tiempo como recurso didáctico y pedagógico para la Prehistoria y la Arqueología (PID 17-53), enmarcado en el PLAN FIDOugr 2016-2018. Esta es la versión digital de su gemela colocada en el suelo del hall la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Univers...

CALL FOR PAPERS International Congress "Debates on Imperfect Peace" (Granada, Spain, 12, 13 and 14th May 2016) http://www.ugr.es/~pazimperfecta/index.html The aim of this event is to contribute to the debate, dialogue and development of one of the most successful concepts generated in Peace Research in the last years: Imperfect Peace, coined by...

The paleontological sites of Barranco León-D and Fuente Nueva-3 (Baza Basin, SE Spain) provide the oldest evidence (~1.4 Ma) on human presence in Western Europe during Early Pleistocene times. In this paper we analyze the demographic inferences derived from: (1) the estimates of population density obtained for the species of secondary consumers pre...

With an age of ~1.4 Ma, the Early Pleistocene sites of Barranco León-D and Fuente Nueva-3 (Baza Basin, SE Spain) provide the oldest evidence on human presence in Western Europe. Here we use a mathematical approach based on Leslie matrices to quantify, for the large mammal species preserved at these sites, the biomass of primary consumers available,...

Fuente Nueva 1 is a paleontological site known since the 1980's, but few excavations have taken place in this locality during the time elapsed from its discovery. The last excavation season, in the summer of 2015, has unearthed more than 250 bone remains of large mammals. It should be notedthe appearance of more than 30 horn cores, mostly complete,...

Partiendo de la premisa de dinamizar ciertos recursos existentes en el Departa- mento de Prehistoria y Arqueología (la colección de réplicas osteológicas - cráneos - y un escáner 3D de superficie) nos propusimos como objetivo componer una colección virtual de referencia de materiales osteológicos accesible, com- prensible y funcional, para enriquec...

The relative importance of the two main cranial complexes, the neurocranium and the splanchnocranium, has been examined in the five species of extant hominoids and in a huge sample of extinct hominins using six standard craniometric variables that measure the length, width and height of each cranial module. Factor analysis and two-block partial lea...

El dimorfismo sexual es una característica que permite diferenciar a mujeres de hombres. Desde un punto de vista cuantitativo los complejos óseos que mejor discriminan el sexo de los individuos humanos son, por ese orden, la pelvis y el cráneo. Por otra parte, cuanto más variabilidad presenta una población más difícil resulta distinguir morfométric...

Brain volume and cheek-tooth size have traditionally been considered as two traits that show opposite evolutionary trends during the evolution of Homo. As a result, differences in encephalization and molarization among hominins tend to be interpreted in paleobiological grounds, because both traits were presumably linked to the dietary quality of ex...

The functional significance of teeth size, specifically postcanine tooth size has contributed a vast amount of scientific literature. Nevertheless, these studies have been based on 'equivalence between exponents'. That is, when the tooth size scales to the 0.75 power of body size exponent is interpreted as reflecting differences in metabolic requir...

The Lubischew’s test (LT) is a parametric statistical tool, based on the Student’s t-test, developed in 1962 by a Russian biologist (A.A. Lubischew) to evaluate the degree of overlap between two data sets of single variables. The coefficient of discrimination is expressed as K and is calculated as the quotient of the difference between the respecti...

This study assesses the performance of two analytical approaches to sex discrimination based on single linear variables: discriminant analysis and the Lubischew's test. Ninety individuals from an archaeological population (La Torrecilla-Arenas del Rey, Granada, southern Spain) and 17 craniometrical variables were included in the analyses. Most cran...

Este ensayo es consecuencia de las reflexiones que desde hace años realizamos en el Instituto de Paz y Conflictos de la Universidad de Granada y que nos ha obligado a hacer una deconstrucción crítica de algunos aspectos del pensamiento pacifista. Bien es cierto que la supervivencia de la especie ha sido posible porque la respuesta a la conflictivid...

The canines of hominins are quite different in both size and shape compared to those of their closest extant relatives (chimpanzees and gorillas). On the other hand, it has been argued that canine size and sexual size dimorphism is related to socio-sexual behaviour, but there is only limited evidence as to whether these aspects are informative rega...

The giant hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris was the largest bone-cracking carnivore that ever existed. With the mass of a lioness, it had massive limbs with shortened distal bones and a heavy, powerfully built mandible with robust, well-developed premolars. All these features reflect its adaptation for dismembering ungulate carcasses, transporting la...

There is probably no paleoanthropological issue with deeper disagreements than the taxonomic status of the Early–Middle Pleistocene members of the genus Homo One reason could be the difficulty of estimating the relationship between morphological and taxonomic diversity. In an attempt to contribute new evidence to this debate, bootstrapping techniqu...

Sex determination on osteological remains is key since it is the initial step to establish another kind of biological and cultural inferences. Though sex determination arises easily when some particular parts of the skeleton are collected, specifically the pelvis and the skull, this target is more difficult from other bones, specifically when they...

Sex determination on osteological remains is key since it is the initial step to establish another kind of biological and cultural inferences. Though sex determination arises easily when some particular parts of the skeleton are collected, specifically the pelvis and the skull, this target is more difficult from other bones, specifically when they...

La determinación del sexo de los individuos de colecciones arqueológicas es un tema fundamental porque a partir de ella se pueden discutir muchos aspectos sociales y biológicos. Es bien conocido que no todos los huesos, incluso partes de los mismos, alcanzan la misma relevancia para la discriminación del sexo puesto que no todos reflejan con la mis...

Tesis Univ. Granada. Departamento de Prehistoria y Arqueología. Leída el 13 de junio de 2006