Prehistoric Caves of France and Spain

Beebe Bahrami is an award-winning writer and anthropologist who specializes in the intersecting worlds of European, Atlantic, and Mediterranean cultures from prehistory to the present. She earned her BA from the University of Colorado and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where she trained in the four-field anthropological tradition of cultural, biological, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology.

Beebe continues to research and write about the past and present of the lands and peoples of southwestern France and northern Spain. Her work covers a wide range of topics, from prehistoric sites, landscapes, and caves, to those of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages, through antiquity and into the medieval and the modern era. Working with international teams, she has excavated and written about the Neanderthal sites of La Ferrassie, Pech de l’Azé, and Roc de Marsal. She also is an expert on the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain and has walked some 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) and counting, on these ancient routes, studying both the ancient pre-Christian landscapes, as well as the traditions, history, and lore that arose with the medieval pilgrimage.

Beebe has authored numerous books, including Café Oc: A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France; Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places; andThe Way of the Wild Goose: Three Pilgrimages Following Geese, Stars, and Hunches on the Camino de Santiago; as well as comprehensive travel guides such as Moon’s Camino de Santiago—Sacred Sites, Historic Villages, and Local Food & Wine.

Photo credit: Dennis Sandgathe

Dr. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist, professor of anthropology and a Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada where she has taught classes on cave art for more than 20 years. She directs an international team of researchers in the study of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in Australia and France and on ostrich eggshell beads in South Africa.  In 2016, she and her colleagues working in Jordan published the world’s oldest identifiable blood on stone tools, demonstrating that 300,000 years ago early humans ate a range of animals from duck to rhinoceros. 

She is known for her publications on Paleolithic art, cognitive archaeology, neandertals, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. Her work has been covered by more than 100 outlets including the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN’s website, the Economist, and NPR; and her blood residue work was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 discoveries.

April is the author of the book Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Archaeological Association Book Prize.  She is featured in episode 5 of the NOVA series Ancient Earth and in the CBC documentary Little Sapiens. 

Click here to read in Smithsonian magazine about one of April's projects.  

Paul Pettitt is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Durham University (UK). He specialises in Palaeolithic art and in the long-term development of the treatment of the dead. Hi PhD (Cambridge University 1999) focussed on Neanderthal stone tool technology in Southwest France based on collections held in the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. From 1995-2001 he was Senior Archaeologist in the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford as well as Research Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology at Keble College, Oxford. From 2003 he was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer (2006), and Reader (2008) in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, and in 2013 he took up his professorial chair at Durham. In 2003 he lead the team which discovered the UK's only Palaeolithic cave art (at Creswell Crags), and subsequently he was part of the small team that demonstrated that Neanderthals created the first European Cave art, through dating of art in El Castillo and other caves in Spain. His survey of the biological and behavioural evolution of Homo sapiens was published by Thames and Hudson in 2022 (Homo Sapiens Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution Rewriting our Origins). He is currently researching aspects of the visual psychology that underpins the earliest cave art.

Dr. Melanie Chang is a paleoanthropologist whose primary scientific interests are later human evolution (Neandertals and modern humans), feminist archaeology, science communication, and the role of reflexivity in human evolutionary studies. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a dual PhD in anthropology and biology, completed a postdoc in behavioral genetics at UCSF, and has pursued research in Western Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa. She has taught classes in skeletal anatomy, archaeology, and human evolution at the University of Victoria and Portland State University since 2012.

An enthusiastic proponent of science education and public outreach, Melanie is a TEDx speaker and has been featured in a number of documentary series, including Human: The World Within (2021). In her free time, she enjoys traveling with her family, playing with her dogs, horseback riding, and pretty much anything having to do with K-pop.