A rock shelter in northeastern Spain is giving archaeologists a rare and clear look at one of the biggest changes in human history, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. The site, called Coves del Fem, sits above the Montsant River in Catalonia and has been dug up since 2013. A new round of digging in the summer of 2026 found well-kept layers from both hunter-gatherer groups and early farming communities living at the same spot. This kind of clean, layered record is rare to find, and it helps researchers understand how people in this part of Spain slowly gave up hunting and began growing food instead. What makes this shelter so valuable isn't any single discovery, but the continuity itself, one spot where the same ground quietly recorded thousands of years of people changing how they fed themselves, layer resting on layer.
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