A team of scientists from the Universities of Granada and Cambridge, as well as the Government of Catalonia, have identified the oldest pieces of Baltic amber ever found on the Iberian Peninsula, revealing that this luxury material used in jewelry and handicrafts around the world was already being imported more than 5,000 years ago.

A team of scientists from the Universities of Granada and Cambridge, as well as the Government of Catalonia, have identified the oldest pieces of Baltic amber ever found on the Iberian Peninsula, revealing that this luxury material used in jewelry and handicrafts around the world was already being imported more than 5,000 years ago.

The research was led by UGR lecturer Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and involved the collaboration of Marcos Martinón-Torres of the University of Cambridge and Araceli Martín Cólliga of the Government of Catalonia. According to Murillo-Barroso, the work “allows us to say with confidence that the arrival of Baltic amber on the Iberian Peninsula occurred at least in the 4th millennium BC, more than a millennium earlier than we thought, and that it was probably part of wider trade networks linked to the south of France.”