The Prado Vargas Neanderthal camp in Cornejo, northern Burgos—part of the vast Ojo Guareña karst—has become one of the most extensively excavated Neanderthal cave occupations known. The eleventh systematic campaign ended on 23 August 2026. Co-directors Alfonso Benito Calvo (CENIEH), Marta Navazo (University of Burgos), and Rodrigo Alonso (Museum of Human Evolution) led roughly twenty archaeologists and students working at the cave entrance.

After finishing the younger Upper Palaeolithic sublevels (4A–AB), the team opened another 32 m² of Neanderthal sublevel 4D, bringing the total exposed area to 140 m². Spanish and international coverage, including Provisional dating: Sublevel 4D carries a mean age of about 46,000 years (~46 kya)—a working mean from ongoing research, not a single sealed calendar date. A fireplace found in 2025 in the Upper Palaeolithic sequence has a preliminary age of about 35,000 years; that figure remains provisional pending further study of associated materials.

Among the season’s standout finds are additional bone retouchers—fragments of large mammal long bones used to refresh stone edges. Together with earlier campaigns they now total around 100 at the site, making Prado Vargas a key locality for studying how Neanderthals maintained stone toolkits. Taken with the dense debris field and repeated butcher marks, the pattern supports a large seasonal camp used mainly from spring through late autumn across multiple generations, rather than a fleeting hunting stopover.

Community outreach ran in parallel: about fifty volunteers washed roughly half a tonne of sediment on the Trema River (10–14 August), recovering microfauna such as voles useful for Late Pleistocene climate reconstruction, and an open day on 22 August drew 72 local visitors. Co-directors also presented the latest results on 11 August in Puente Viesgo’s Prehistory lecture series. Further Spanish context appears in El Correo de Burgos.

Supporters named by the excavators include the Burgos Provincial Council, Merindad de Sotoscueva Town Council, the Junta de Castilla y León culture ministry, Fundación Palarq, the Ojo Guareña Natural Monument visitor centre, and local partners at Cornejo and Quisicedo. For readers following Iberian Middle Palaeolithic research, the Prado Vargas Neanderthal camp now offers an unusually broad spatial window on how Neanderthal groups organized a long-used home base deep in Burgos’ Ojo Guareña system.

The same 2026 season closed excavation of the Upper Palaeolithic layers linked to early Homo sapiens in inland Iberia. Studying finds around the ~35 kya fireplace should clarify how modern humans later used Ojo Guareña and the Trema valley after Neanderthal occupation ended—confirming that Prado Vargas sheltered both groups at different times. Field crews came chiefly from the universities of Burgos, Cantabria, and Complutense Madrid, with participants from Austral University of Chile and Chile’s Natural History Museum.

This season alone yielded more than 1,500 animal remains and stone artefacts. Faunal bones and teeth include wild boar, horse, steppe bison, aurochs, fallow deer, and red deer. Many show cut marks and percussion stigmata on limb bones—clear evidence that Neanderthals butchered carcasses inside the cave and opened long bones for marrow. Lithics are dominated by flint (~95%), with quartzite and quartz pebbles making up the rest. Simple sharp flakes predominate, alongside scrapers, notches, and denticulates.

=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>phys.org, Knowridge, and Diario de Castilla y León, frame that footprint as among the largest Neanderthal cave surfaces excavated worldwide.