Portugal in the Ice Age, the Land and the Inhabitants

This essay is a science-based excursion to the times of the most remote humans whose genes were transmitted to us: the family of the child of Lapedo, the neanderthals in Oliveira Cave or the heidelbergensis in Aroeira Cave.

At that time, the current Serra da Estrela was covered with ice and drifting icebergs could be seen from the coast. The well less than ten thousand inhabitants of this space were hunter-gatherers who lived alongside lions, hyenas, rhinos and horses in wooded moorlands reminiscent of those of Scotland today.
Vestiges still remain of what they were, what they ate and what they did and these are increasingly being deciphered by Palaeolithic archaeology. Come and find out what we were like around here in the Ice Age.

November 2023