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EL MIRÓN CAVE AND THE CULTURAL AND HUMAN POPULATION HISTORY OF WESTERN EUROPE DURING AND AFTER THE CLIMATIC CRISIS

OF THE LAST GLACIAL MAXIMUM

Lawrence Guy Straus 

University of New Mexico

7:30 PM, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 Albuquerque Museum of Art and History 2000 Mountain Road NW

(Also available online)

El Mirón is a large, strategically located cave on the northern flank of the Cantabrian Cordillera, about 20 km from the present Atlantic shore in northern Spain. Excavated since 1996 by Straus and Manuel González Morales, it has revealed a sequence of occupation levels ranging from the late Middle Paleolithic through the Bronze Age, dated by102 radiocarbon assays between >46,000 and 3,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic layers mainly pertain to the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000-21,000 BP) and Late Glacial (21,000-12,000 BP) climatic phases respectively. A rare human burial, the 19,000-year-old “Red Lady of El Mirón,” pertains to the Lower Magdalenian. In addition to providing abundant and diverse information on paleoenvironments, stone and bone technologies, faunal remains, human hunting, fishing and gathering, seasonality of occupations, hearths and fire-use, portable and rock art, personal ornaments, and burial ritual, the site has become a key referent in the new discipline of paleogenetics, beginning with the analysis of the Red Lady’s DNA by Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo. Supporting archeologically-based arguments by Michael Jochim and myself in the late 1980s that SW Europe had served as a refugium for human populations during the climatic crisis of the Last Glacial Maximum, the paleogenetic evidence from human remains—in addition to those of the Red Lady—spanning the Upper Paleolithic from Belgium to Andalucia, and now in revolutionary DNA analyses of sediments from the Solutrean levels of El Mirón by Pere Gelabert, shows the following: 1. Gene flow from Russia into Western European populations of the Gravettian before the Last Glacial Maximum; 2. Retraction of the range of people who had lived in NW Europe into SW Europe during the Solutrean/Last Glacial Maximum; 3. Infusion of genes into SW Europe from the Balkans via Northern Italy together with recolonization of NW Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum by this mixed-gene Magdalenian population. None of this was imaginable when I first visited El Mirón in 1973 or when we began to excavate it nearly 30 years ago.

Lawrence Straus is Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, where he taught from 1975 to 2016. In 1975, he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where he had earlier obtained his A.M. and A.B. degrees (Honors and Phi Beta Kappa). His dissertation was on the Solutrean of Cantabrian Spain and he is a specialist in the Upper Paleolithic of Western (Atlantic) Europe. He has directed/co-directed excavations in Spain (La Riera and El Mirón caves), France (Abri Dufaure), Portugal (notably at Vidigal and Casa da Moura), and Belgium (Trou Magrite, Huccorgne, Bois Laiterie and Abri du Pape). His archeological fieldwork has spanned most of the late Quaternary period, from the Middle Paleolithic through the Bronze Age. He was Editor-in-Chief of the 79-year-old Journal of Anthropological Research from 1995 through 2022, the author or editor/author of 22 books/special journal issues/monographs, and author/co-author of well over 600 journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, reviews, and comments. He is perhaps best-known for the discovery and study of the “Red Lady of El Mirón,” a 19,000-year old human burial in highly ritualized context, published as a special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, and whose DNA has been a critical aspect of two articles in Nature. Together with Manuel González Morales, he has directed the El Mirón Prehistoric Project in Cantabria, Spain since 1996. His French grandfather and great-grandfather were amateur prehistorians in SW France. Straus’ wife, Mari Carmen, and daughter, Eva, are “montañesas” from Cantabria.