Karen Ruebens received her PhD from the University of Southampton (UK) in 2012 and has since been working as a postdoctoral researcher, first at the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre for Human Behavioural Evolution (Neuwied) and then at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA, Leipzig). After a maternity break she successfully obtained a fellowship through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career Restart scheme for a project at MPI-EVA focussing on Middle Palaeolithic projectile technology in Western Europe. Her research interests are focused on unravelling Neanderthal behaviour through wider-scale comparative lithic and faunal analyses, most recently including training in Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).  She is currently, a research scientist at the  Collége de France in the Palaeoanthropology section.