Reply to: Lack of evidence for initial Upper Palaeolithic attribution at Cueva Millán in Iberia’s Hinterland

In their Matters Arising, Tsanova et al. interpret the lithic assemblage from Cueva Millán Layer 1 (Millán 1) as Middle Palaeolithic (MP) 1 . They contrast this with what they incorrectly present as our attribution of Millán 1 to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) and, by extension, to an early expansion of Homo sapiens into Iberia. However, our work neither classified Millán 1 as an IUP-type assemblage nor associated it with a specific species 2 . Here, we clarify our conceptual framework and classification proposal and demonstrate that their arguments for a MP attribution are not empirically supported.