Juan Luis Arsuaga (Madrid, 1954) is a Professor of Palaeontology at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense. He has been a member of the Pleistocene Sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca Research Team (working in Burgos, Spain) since 1982, first under Emiliano Aguirre Enríquez, and, since 1991 co-director together with José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell de Castro. The team won the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research in 1997 and the Castile-Leon Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 1997. He is a member of the Paris Museum of Man and of the International Association for the Study of Human Palaeontology, and is Vice-president of the Council of Human Palaeontology and Paleoecology of the International Union for Quaternary Research. He has spoken to conferences at universities in London, Cambridge, Zurich, Roma, Arizona, Philadelphia, Berkeley, New York and Tel Aviv. Author of El collar del neandertal, La especie elegida, El mundo de Atapuerca, El reloj de Mr. Darwin, Breve historia de la Tierra (con nosotros dentro), El primer viaje de nuestra vida and Vida, la gran historia, among others. His most recent publication, written together with the writer Juan José Millás, is La vida contada por un sapiens a un neandertal.