Research associate
Paleoecology and Biochronology
Born in Barcelona in 1954. Biological Sciences PhD at the Universidad de Barcelona advised by Prof. Miquel Crusafont (1981). Director of the Institut de Paleontología M. Crusafont between 1985 and 2005. From 2005 onwards is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolución Social (Tarragona). Three successful ICREA promotions (2009, 2014, 2018) with the qualification of “Very Good”. Delayed retirement as ICREA Research Professor until 2024. Full member of the Real Academia de Ciencias y Artes de Barcelona since 15/04/1999. Specialized in fossil small mammals, his main field of interest focused on the climatic and environmental changes of the last 10 million years, most specially those which have influenced the evolution of our lineage, as it is the case of the beginning of the glacial-interglacial dynamics at about 2.6 million years ago, the set of events at about 1.8 million years ago or the early-middle Pleistocene transition between 1.2 and 0.6 milion years ago. His research activity focused both in Spain (Vallès-Penedès, Fortuna and Guadix-Baza basins) as well as outside this country, having coordinated field-work and projects in northern Africa and in the Caucasus. He is a member of the research team which investigates at the Georgian site of Dmanisi, where the oldest Eurasian hominins have been found. Since 1985 he has been Principal Investigator of more than 20 projects, including applications to Spanish national programs, Generalitat de Catalunya, Región de Murcia and Junta de Andalucía.
He is author or co-author of 151 papers published in indexed journals (WOS), among them Nature (4), Science (1) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (3), as well as other 162 papers in non-indexed Spanish and international journals. He is author or co-author of 52 book chapters. He has edited 14 books or monographs and has written 20 books, among them La evolución y sus metáforas (1994,Tusquets Eds.), Mammoths, sabertooths, and hominids (2002, Columbia University Press), Fósiles, genes y teorías (2003,Tusquets Eds.), El ajedrez de la vida (2010, Editorial Crítica), La gran migración (2011, Ed. Crítica), .El precio de la inteligencia (2012, Ed. Crítica), Los primeros pobladores de Europa (2013, RBA-National Geographic), Alicia en el País de la Evolución (2013, Ed. Crítica), La sonrisa de Leonardo (2015, RBA Editores) and Genes, cerebros y símbolos (2021,Tusquets Eds.). He has directed 13 PhD thesis and 9 Master thesis. Among his main contributions are the elaboration of detailed biozonations based on rodents for the late Neogene and Quaternary of the Vallès-Penedès, Fortuna (Murcia) and Guadix-Baza (Granada) basins, the elaboration of a calibrated chronological scale for the mammalian successions of the Neogene from Western Europe (Agustí et al., 2001; Earth Science Reviews), as well as contributions to the analysis of the chronological and climatic context of the first hominin peopling of Eurasia (Dmanisi, Orce; Agustí et al., 2009, 2011, 2015; Blain et al., 2014; Capellini et al., 2019). H-Index (WOS): 41.
