People were living above 6,500 feet in the Pyrenees mountains as far back as 10,000 years ago, and they never really left. That is the finding from a new study by researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, who built an open database of carbon-14 dated samples to trace human presence at a Spanish national park across thousands of years.
According to Phys.org, the team created a database of 124 dated samples drawn from 45 sites within the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park in Catalonia. The database covers 380 documented archaeological sites in total. Ermengol Gassiot, director of the High Mountain Archaeology Group at UAB, called it "the first openly published systematic series of absolute dates of a high-mountain area of the Pyrenees."
The study was published in the journal Archaeologica Data. It includes laboratory reports, sample types, site contexts, and the analysis code, all made available so other researchers can replicate the work.
Three sites stood out for showing continuous human use across thousands of years. The oldest is the Obagues de Ratera rock shelter, sitting at 2,320 meters, or about 7,612 feet. First occupied 10,000 years ago, the site shows evidence of use across a remarkable span of human history: the Mesolithic, the transition to the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic, the Early and Middle Bronze Age, the beginning of the Iron Age, the High Middle Ages during the Visigothic period, and even the 19th and 20th centuries. Co-author Guillem Salvador called it "an exceptional temporal sequence that very few sites in Catalonia have, not only in the high mountains."
The second site, Cova del Sardo, sits at 1,780 meters and shows occupations going back 7,500 years. The third, the Portarró rock shelter at 2,280 meters, has evidence dating back 7,300 years.
The findings push back against any assumption that high-altitude mountain environments were only visited occasionally or seasonally in prehistoric times. Excavations at Obagues de Ratera show that small groups of hunter-gatherers were already moving through the alpine zone shortly after the last glacial period ended, during a time when small cirque glaciers still existed nearby and temperatures were gradually rising.
The data also reveal periods when human activity in the high mountains clearly intensified. The researchers tied some of these surges to the end of the Neolithic, though the full pattern of expansion and contraction across the millennia is one of the central contributions of the new chronological framework.
The database is openly accessible, meaning researchers studying other mountain regions can use the UAB team's methods and code as a model. The Pyrenees study covers only one national park, but its scope, 380 sites, 124 dated samples, and a timeline stretching across the entire Holocene epoch, makes it one of the most detailed records of continuous high-altitude human occupation assembled for any region in Europe.
The research adds to a growing body of work showing that mountain environments were not barriers or empty spaces in prehistory but active, repeatedly used landscapes where people hunted, herded, sheltered, and returned across generations.
