Clive wanted to show me one site in particular where he had been excavating in search of Neanderthals for several years – with very successful results: Gorham’s Cave.
‘Most of the evidence is submerged or has been lost. So we’re lucky to have Gorham’s Cave: the sea hasn’t washed the sediments away there. And we’ve found a lot of evidence of Neanderthal occupation: stone tools, animals that they’ve butchered, hearths – Neanderthal barbecues, if you like.’
The site had first been excavated in the 1950s, then had lain forgotten for decades. Clive had started excavations again in 1991.
‘We come every year and excavate the site. It’s huge. There’s eighteen metres’ depth of archaeology in there, and there are new results coming out every year.’
The results of radiocarbon dating on charcoal from the cave showed that it was occupied until 28,000, and perhaps even as late as 24,000 years ago. It made this cave the last known Neanderthal outpost.3
Some archaeologists have argued that these late dates for the uppermost Mousterian level in Gorham’s Cave are due to contamination with charcoal from even higher, Upper Palaeolithic layers. But Clive has argued that the stratigraphy inside the cave is reliable, and that indeed, after the last Middle Palaeolithic occupation, the cave seemed to have lain abandoned for 5000 years. After 19,000 years ago, the cave was reoccupied, by modern humans bearing a later Upper Palaeolithic toolkit called the Solutrean.3
Clive didn’t like the idea of Gibraltar as a ‘refugium’ for Neanderthals. ‘When we talk about a “refuge”, the impression is almost that this is a place that Neanderthals came because there was nowhere else to go,’ he said. ‘The reality is that this was a good place to be. And for a period of 100,000 years, there were Neanderthals living here.’
Even when Europe was beginning to feel the full chill of the LGM, between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago, south-west Iberia was experiencing a mild but still balmy Mediterranean climate, with mean annual temperatures of around 13–17 degrees C – in fact, very similar to today.3,4
The large caves that now lie right on the rocky coast would have been set back from the seashore 25,000 years ago. Offering protection from the elements and from predators, I imagined the caves would have made quite sought-after Palaeolithic homes. Hearths had been lit deep inside Gorham’s Cave – but it was tall enough for smoke to rise to the ceiling and find its way out without getting into the eyes and throats of the cave-dwellers. And there were plenty of resources just on the doorstep. The sea would have been much lower than it is today, with a mosaic of habitats including woodlands and wetlands between the foot of the cliffs and the coast. The sandy coastal plain would have been dotted with sand pines and junipers, and liberally watered with streams. ‘The vegetation also indicates seasonal pools,’ explained Clive, ‘and that’s also borne out by animal remains that we’ve found, including newts and frogs, and waterfowl like ducks and coots.’
We had hoped to access the cave from the sea, but just an hour or so after we had set out on a millpond, the winds and currents had conspired to create a sizeable swell that would make any landing attempt dangerous. We continued northwards in the boat, Clive pointing out other caves that had been home to Neanderthals. But, of course, with the change in sea level, it was likely that a lot of evidence was under the waves. And Clive and Gerry were looking there, too.
Turning around, we headed back around Europa Point and into the Bay of Gibraltar, to rendezvous with the dive boat. Already on board were Gerry and marine ecologist Darren Fa. As we transferred on to the boat, I learnt that work had already started: somewhere beneath us, two underwater archaeologists were busy trying to move a large rock, using air-filled lift bags. Gerry was hoping that removing this rock would reveal an undisturbed layer of sediment. Surveys of the seabed had revealed a large reef, some 20 to 40m beneath the waves. Caves in this reef would have been on the coast – rather than underwater – during the time of the Neanderthals. The archaeologists were interested in collecting samples which would provide even more information about the palaeoenvironment, but they were also hoping that they might find signs of ancient occupation hidden beneath the seabed. Mounting an archaeological investigation of this type requires expertise in diving, marine ecology, underwater archaeology – and patience.
‘The logistics involved are really difficult,’ said Gerry. ‘It’s expensive and very time-consuming. If you’re excavating in a cave and your pencil breaks, for example, you can just go to your box of tools and get another one. If you’re on the bottom of the sea and your pencil goes, and you don’t have another, that’s the end of your dive. We take two of as many things as possible. We plan very carefully. But sometimes things go wrong, and you have to come back to the surface.’
Each diver could stay down for only an hour at most – so each day’s digging was about meticulous planning, and small but effective steps towards collecting data. They worked in shifts; Gerry and Darren got into their wetsuits and dive gear ready to step in as the first team resurfaced.
Out on the boat, I could clearly see the mountains of Morocco in the distance: the Rock of Gibraltar lies just 21km across that narrow strait from Morocco. Once again, I found myself surprised that there was no evidence that this had ever been a crossing point in Palaeolithic times. Modern humans appeared to have stayed firmly put on the African side, and there’s nothing to suggest that Neanderthals ever made the journey over to Morocco either.
When Gerry and Darren came back up, I asked them what they’d found.
‘We actually managed to move the rock using the lift bags,’ said Darren. ‘And we got some sediment,’ said Gerry. She was very pleased that they had made steady progress and managed to safely shift the rock, opening up the previously covered sediments for excavation. I had sort of hoped that one of the divers might bring up a nice Mousterian tool from the seabed on the day I was there, but that was a bit too much to hope for. It was slow and painstaking work – but essential if we are to learn more about the ancient environments that our ancestors and Neanderthals inhabited.
Back on dry land, Clive was keen to show me some of the animal bones that had been found in Vanguard Cave, the neighbouring cave to Gorham’s, occupied by Neanderthals over 50,000 years ago.
I picked up a metapodial, a foot bone. It looked a bit like a sheep bone to me. ‘That one,’ said Clive, ‘well, either it’s their favourite, or it’s easier to catch, or there’s a lot more of them than other herbivores. It’s a wild goat: Iberian ibex. Eighty per cent of the large mammal bones belong to this species.’
Red deer bones were also fairly common. ‘They were quite partial to those.’ There was also a bone from an aurochs: a massive, ancestral cow. Clive thought that bringing down an animal of this size, with its huge horns, would have required a certain degree of courage, planning and cooperative hunting. ‘It’s probably not remarkable that we don’t find that many of them,’ he said.
‘Perhaps surprisingly, given what has been said about Neanderthals, we’re also finding smaller animals. Nearly 90 per cent of all the mammal bones are rabbit.’
I did find this surprising. It didn’t fit with the traditional view of Neanderthals as big-game hunters.
‘And it’s not just land resources that they’re using,’ said Clive, rather proudly. ‘They’re eating limpets and mussels. And just look at this,’ he picked up a jaw with sharp teeth. ‘It’s a monk seal. And this isn’t an isolated case. A lot of the bones have cut marks. I think there’s too many of them to be stranded animals; I think they’re hunting them. And it gets even more complicated when you look at things like this …’
He handed me a dolphin’s vertebra. I could just make out some cut marks on one of the bony levers – the transverse processes – sticking out from the body of the bone. These weren’t trowel marks from a clumsy modern archaeologist: they were thin cuts from a flint tool. It appeared that we were looking at the remains of a Neanderthal’s dinner.5 So it looked like Neanderthals were just as capab
le of adapting to a coastal way of life as our ancestors had been. There were bird bones as well – but could Clive be sure that these had been eaten?
‘There’s very little evidence for other predator action. We don’t have cut marks on these bones, but it seems that there may be tooth marks – from Neanderthals. The dominant species are partridge, quail, ducks: the kinds of birds that you or I might find palatable. Clearly, birds are on the menu.
‘We’ve looked so much at Neanderthals in the north where large mammals were available, and it’s created a slightly biased impression,’ suggested Clive. ‘Here, big game was in the diet,’ he continued, ‘but I see the Neanderthals more as beachcombers, collectors of plants, hunters of birds and rabbits, who occasionally caught a goat, more occasionally a deer, and even more occasionally got a large, dangerous animal. Like human societies today, I’m sure the Neanderthals had cultural and geographic diversity. They were exploiting whatever was available on their doorstep.’
Other sites also challenge the idea of the Neanderthals as behaviourally inflexible. Arcy-sur-Cure in south-west France has produced stone tools that are rather weird – almost sitting on the definitional fence between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic – combining Mousterian-like flake-based tools with ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ blades and bone tools. While it appeared to have developed out of the Mousterian tradition, it was seen as marking the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, and used to be called the ‘Early Aurignacian’. Along with the ‘transitional’ toolkit, there were also pierced fox canines, apparently evidence of personal ornamentation. The site is not unique: the tools from Arcy are classified as Chatelperronian, after the cave at Chatelperron in south-west France where this technology was first described. Examples of this technology have been discovered throughout central and southern France, and in northern Spain. But who made it? Fossils had been found in association with Chatelperronian tools at Arcy-sur-Cure, but they were so fragmentary that it seemed impossible to tell if they came from modern humans or Neanderthals. They dated to 34,000 years ago – when both populations were in Europe.
But then, in 1996, an international team including French archaeologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and Fred Spoor from UCL showed that the anatomy inside the temporal bone – the bone at the side of the skull that contains the workings of the ear including the semicircular canals – was characteristically Neanderthal.6 So this suggests that it was Neanderthals who made the Chatelperronian. But did they invent it independently or copy it from modern humans, or is this a change in technology that shows behavioural adaptation to a changing environment? Clive put it to me that it represented a change from ambush hunting to projectile technology. It seems pertinent that the Chatelperronian appears only after modern humans have come into close proximity with Neanderthals – but this was also a time of major climate upheavals. In fact, both possibilities – copying or innovation – suggest a certain behavioural flexibility and intelligence that we have not always credited the Neanderthals with in the past. ‘I think we may have underestimated the Neanderthals,’ said Clive.
The Chatelperronian can be seen as rather problematic as it blurs the distinction between what archaeologists would consider to be a Neanderthal and modern human technologies. It challenges our pre-conceptions. Archaeological evidence like this makes it seem less inevitable that modern humans survived where Neanderthals didn’t – and shows that the Neanderthals were much closer to us than we’ve perhaps liked to think in the past. But they did disappear. On a continental scale, climate changes and the presence of a competitor in the landscape probably played their roles in the demise of our sister species. Their population gradually contracted, until, it seems, just a few of them were left in Gibraltar, happily living a coastal lifestyle in this idyllic corner of Europe, and probably completely unaware that they were the last of a long European lineage. So what happened to the last Neanderthals?
From Clive and Gerry’s work on Gibraltar there doesn’t seem to have been a ‘last stand’ with modern humans taking the Rock from their distant cousins. There’s a distinct gap between the last evidence of Neanderthals, at 24,000 years ago, and the first evidence of modern humans – at about 18,000 years ago. ‘There’s a gap of five thousand years when there’s nobody living in these caves,’ said Clive. So it seems that competition between the two populations could not have played a role in this particular location.
Clive suggested that, in the end, it may have just been a numbers game. If the Neanderthal population was very small, then they could have easily died out – just think of threatened species today. ‘These last Neanderthal populations would have been very small and very vulnerable,’ he said. Inbreeding and increased rates of congenital disease could also have contributed. But Clive also thought that climate played a crucial role in the demise of those late-surviving Neanderthals. ‘We’ve looked at deep-sea cores offshore here, and the most severe climatic conditions of the previous quarter of a million years hit precisely at the point that Neanderthals disappear.’
Although Gibraltar had enjoyed a mild climate up to 24,000 years ago, there then seemed to be a sudden and severe downturn in conditions. Evidence from marine cores shows a drop in temperatures at this time, known to palaeoclimatologists as the ‘Heinrich 2 Event’. These Heinrich Events are moments of ‘ice-rafting’: icebergs breaking off the northern ice sheets then drifting south in the Atlantic caused a distinct chill in the ocean. The Neanderthals had survived cold before, but during this ‘event’, the sea surface temperature was the coldest it had been for a quarter of a million years. For Clive, this sudden cold and dry period could explain the demise of the last Neanderthals. ‘So it could be that climate change was the final nail in the coffin for these last Neanderthals.’
For Clive, the final extinction of the Neanderthals and the expansion of modern humans are separate events. Though he accepts that contact may have happened elsewhere, the evidence on Gibraltar shows that those late-surviving Neanderthals disappeared thousands of years before modern humans arrived on their patch.3
‘But I think it’s a long, drawn-out process [across Europe]; there’s not one event that causes their extinction.’
In contrast to the traditional view of Neanderthals as cold-adapted people of Ice Age Europe, Clive Finlayson viewed them as warm-loving humans, who survived late in Gibraltar because Mediterranean conditions lasted longer there. Even in winter, days were long, and the range of environments around the coast of Gibraltar allowed people with a diversified subsistence to survive in rough times – at least until the Heinrich 2 Event. In contrast, Clive saw the modern humans as the more cold-adapted bunch of people. He may be right. Although Neanderthals are stocky and short-limbed – suggesting they were biologically better adapted to cold climates than rangy, long-limbed modern humans, they may not have had the cultural adaptations to beat the chill of the Ice Age. And their physical adaptations may even have held them back. Contrastingly, if modern humans were physiologically more vulnerable to cold, this may have spurred them on to develop advanced clothing – which later meant that they had the wherewithal to survive through the LGM.7
Certainly, at around 25,000 years ago, we see a new culture emerging in Europe, apparently brought in by a second wave of modern humans from the north-east: people who appeared to have been quite comfortable in temperatures that are more reminiscent of Siberia today.
A Cultural Revolution: Dolní Vìstonice, Czech Republic
The period between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago was one of global climatic instability, leading up to the LGM.1 During this time, a new culture and technology spread across Europe – the Gravettian, named after the site of La Gravette in the Dordogne, where the characteristic stone points of this technology were first recognised.
This culture appears to have started in north-eastern Europe about 33,000 years ago, with sites like Kostenki, on the Don River. It comes along as the world was cooling down, in the run-up to the peak of the last Ice Age, and many archaeologists see the
Gravettian as an adaptation to colder, periglacial environments. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, although this culture is a European phenomenon, there are similarities with the middle Upper Palaeolithic culture of Siberia. The Gravettian is the ‘technology of the steppes’: these people were reindeer and mammoth hunters, who thrived in cold climates, and spread into Europe as the temperature dropped off.
Innovations in the Gravettian include better shelters – such as the 25,000-year-old semi-subterranean dwelling at Gagarino on the Don. The hearth in this Ice Age house contained burnt bone: it appears that the Gravettians were turning to alternative sources of fuel. Stone lamps appear in the archaeological record, and, at Kostenki, lamps seem to have been made from the heads of mammoth thigh bones. Just as in Siberia at this time, eyed needles indicate that people were capable of making clothes. The Gravettians also seem to have invented cold storage – digging pits (using mammoth-tusk mattocks) which may have been used to store meat or bones for fuel. The hunting technology of the Gravettians included a range of innovations: bevelled stone points, ivory boomerangs and even woven nets – perhaps for hunting small game. Compared with the Aurignacian, stone blades were narrower and lighter, often retouched into very sharp points. Some assemblages include tanged or shouldered points.2 There also appear to have been changes in society. Massive, complex occupation sites have been found that suggest people were ‘getting together’ on a large scale. Whether these are gatherings for communal hunts, feasts or other social occasions is unclear, but this certainly implies that social networks were enlarging and society was getting more complex for these Ice Age hunter-gatherers. 3 Perhaps the most intriguing material evidence passed down to us from the Gravettian, though, are objects that have no obvious function: the so-called ‘Venus figurines’.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 31