Collaborator of the Spanish National Research Council, in 1988 he joined the Rovira i Virgili University (until 1991) as a professor, a branch of the University of Barcelona in Tarragona, where he has been a professor of Prehistory since 1999. From this institution he spearheaded an interdisciplinary research team which materialised in the creation of the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in 2004, which he headed until 2015. Since 1978 he has undertaken numerous excavations in European and African sites, among which noteworthy are those of Atapuerca, under the direction of Emiliano Aguirre, whom he succeeded in 1991 together with José María Bermúdez de Castro and Juan Luis Arsuaga, and those of the Abric Romaní, which he has been heading since 1983. Founding Trustee and Vice-chairman of Atapuerca Foundation.

He is the author of a great number of works, among others, the article published in the ‘Science’ Magazine, together with other members of the Atapuerca team, with the title ‘A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neanderthals and Modern Humans’ (1997). He introduced the ‘Homo antecessor’ and placed the existence of this extinct human species at a date considerably earlier than the establishment of hominids in Europe. He is also well known as a disseminator and author of numerous essays in which he addresses his vision of the human condition, influenced by his training as a paleoanthropologist and by the ethics of human progress based on Marxism.

He has been appointed distinguished professor at the Rovira i Virgili University (2003), and is a member of the Spanish Chapter of the Club of Rome and the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1997 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award representing the Atapuerca team. In 2000 he received the Narcís Monturiol Medal for Scientific Merit, awarded by the Generalitat of Catalonia, and in 2009 he was awarded the National Culture Award.