A team from the University of Valencia has processed in the 2023 half-tonne sediment campaign, the largest quantity to date, in the Neanderthal deposits of the Salt and Abric del Pastor, located in Alcoy. In excavation work numerous evidence of Neanderthal occupations and fire use has continued.

The active participation of the University of Valencia in the excavations of the aforementioned sites has now been going on for ten years. The researcher Ana Fagoaga, from the Cenozoic Vertebrate Paleontology Research Group of the Department of Botany and Geology of the University, together with other members of the group such as the researcher Rafael Marquina and the professor Francisco Javier Ruiz, together with final year students of the degrees of Biology and Environmental Sciences of the University have developed key tasks for understanding the extinction process of Neanderthal groups.

The research is directed from the University of La Laguna by Carolina Mallol and Cristo Manuel Hernández, and is carried out jointly with researchers from other institutions (University of Alicante, University of Burgos and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle). They are part of the Ministry of Science and Innovation project 'Climate-human interactions in central Mediterranean Iberia during MIS 4 (IBEMIS4)' (PID2019-107113RB-100), in which, in addition to these institutions, the Ministry of Education, Research, Culture and Sports of the Generalitat, the Alcoi City Council and the Camil Visedo Archaeological Museum of Alcoi.

The team from the University of Valencia has been in charge of the recovery and study of small vertebrates from these two sites for more than a decade. During the 2023 campaign, numerous evidence of the use of fire and remains of Neanderthal occupations continue to appear, although their distribution in Stratigraphic Unit XI shows a different spatial pattern. The sediment where the remains are contained also differs, possibly representing different climatic conditions. In the coming months, the intermediate concentrates obtained from the flotation process will be finished being processed in the Geology laboratory of the University, in order to proceed to the paleontological study of the resulting fossil remains.

To date, the work carried out at both sites has allowed the publication of a considerable number of articles in different impact journals, as well as participation in national and international conferences. This last year, without going any further, two doctoral theses and several master's and degree final projects have been read.

The research team has been studying the sites from an interdisciplinary perspective focused on knowledge of the first human settlements in the Alcoyan valleys. As hunter-gatherers, their survival was strongly associated with adaptation to the environment, where climate was a decisive factor in the life of these groups.

Since 2013, members of the University of Valencia have been responsible for the study of climatic evolution in the sedimentary record of the site based on the analysis of the fossil faunas of microvertebrates recorded there. The fossil remains are extracted by applying the flotation technique, which is a procedure widely used in archaeological sites for the separation of organic matter from inorganic matter according to their densities. This allows the recovery of both the remains of charcoal and seeds as well as the remains of microvertebrates contained in the sediment.

The term microvertebrates encompasses small vertebrates, that is, rodents (rats, mice, dormice, hamsters,...), lagomorphs (rabbits, hares and pikas), insectivores (shrews, moles, hedgehogs...), chiropterans (bats) , amphibians and reptiles. This group of animals is widely used for the inference of climatic conditions in archaeo-paleontological sites. Microvertebrate species are usually closely linked to the environmental conditions of the places where they live, so the abundant remains of small vertebrates found in the El Salt and Abric del Pastor sites enable precise climatic approximations of the time interval analyzed.