Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras (born 1954 in Madrid) obtained a master degree and a doctorate in Biological Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he is professor in the Paleontology Department of the Faculty of Geological Sciences.

As a child he already showed a great interest in prehistory after reading Quest for Fire and visiting a dig in nearby Bilbao.

Arsuaga is a visiting professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University College of London and since 1982 he has been a member of the Research Team investigating Pleistocene deposits in the Atapuerca Mountains (Province of Burgos, Spain). He has been a co-director since 1991 with José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell Roura of the Atapuerca Team, which was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research and the Castilla León Prize for the Social Sciences and Humanities, both in 1997. The finds at Atapuerca have shed new light on the first humans in Europe. This contrasts with the secretive atmosphere surrounding the digs to near Orce, in southern Spain, which has yielded tools indicating human presence that predate the finds at Atapuerca.

Don Juan (Spanish, or "Don Giovanni" in Italian) is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630. Evidence suggests it is the first written version of the Don Juan legend. Among the best known works about this character today are Molière's play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1821), José de Espronceda's poem El estudiante de Salamanca (1840) and José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Along with Zorrilla's work (still performed every year on November 2nd throughout the Spanish-speaking world), arguably the best known version is Don Giovanni, an opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787 (with Giacomo Casanova probably in the audience) and itself the source of inspiration for works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Søren Kierkegaard, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Camus.