I have graduate degrees in History (Complutense University, Madrid, 2000) and Geology (Birkbeck- University of London, 2015), and was awarded a PhD at Complutense University in 2005. Between 2005 and 2019 I was part of the faculty staff at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where I became an Honorary Professor after starting my present appointment at CSIC. I am currently a Research Professor at the CSIC-Instituto de Historia and the head of the CSIC-Pleistocene Archaeology Laboratory. My main research interest is in the Archaeology of Human Evolution, as a means of understanding the cognitive abilities of primates, pre-modern and early modern humans. So far, I have applied this approach to three different temporal and geographic contexts, the archaeology of human origins in Africa and China, and the archaeology of the Ice Age in Iberia. I was the Principal Investigator of the ERC- Starting Grant ORACEAF (2012-2016), and then of the ERC-Advanced Grant BICAEHFID (2019-2026).