The evidence is a nearly complete upper jaw, a maxilla, recovered along with other fragments between 2000 and 2003. It belonged to an adult who died somewhere between 35 and 45 years old, and it tells a small, vivid story of chronic suffering. The bone shows periodontal disease and heavy wear, with a striking gap, around eight millimeters at the canine, opening between teeth and jaw. That would have hurt constantly. The two grooves polished into the sides of two teeth are read by researchers as the marks of a toothpick, used again and again against the tender gums. As one study put it, the habit of picking the teeth with a tool may count as early evidence of treatment to ease sore gums. It is a profoundly relatable image: someone in pain, reaching for whatever relief was at hand.

Then, in 2010, on the very spot where the jaw had emerged, excavators uncovered something rarer still: an almost complete Neanderthal skeleton, its bones still articulated along the spine. It is the most complete Neanderthal skeleton ever found on the Iberian peninsula. That completeness is precious. Most of what we know about Neanderthals comes from scattered teeth and splinters of bone; a body preserved in its own arrangement lets researchers see how a whole individual was built, moved, and aged. What is usually a puzzle of fragments here became, for once, nearly a portrait.

The setting explains why anyone lived here at all. Cova Forada is a karst cave about five kilometers southeast of the town of Oliva and only three and a half kilometers from the Mediterranean, tucked into a low rise among the hills known as the Muntanyetes de Oliva, where the Serra de Mustalla finally gives way to the coastal floodplain. It was, by the standards of the Stone Age, a fine address. Mountains rose on one side, wetlands and lagoons spread on the other, and between them lay a rich, varied larder of game, birds, and plants. People kept coming back for it. The cave was occupied from the Middle Paleolithic through the Mesolithic and on into the Bronze Age, a span of use measured not in centuries but in tens of thousands of years.

Systematic excavation began in 1977, led by the archaeologist Jose Aparicio Perez for the provincial government of Valencia, and the cave has been giving up its secrets ever since. The remains are not only of adults. Among the fragments recovered was a molar from a very young child, roughly two and a half years old, found alongside the older individual. That small detail resists any temptation to treat these as mere specimens. A middle-aged man who nursed a painful jaw, a toddler who did not survive, a place returned to across immense stretches of time: Cova Forada holds not a catalog of bones but the traces of real lives, lived and ended between the mountain and the sea.