A narrow gap in Gibraltar’s limestone can open into a question that refuses to stay small: how late did Neanderthals really persist at Europe’s southern edge, and what did they do with the spaces they called home?
The site is the Gorham’s Cave complex on the Rock of Gibraltar-a steep coastal cliff system that comprises Gorham’s, Vanguard, Hyaena, and Bennett’s caves. The location has long been treated as an archaeological hinge-point-Gibraltar was also the site of a Neanderthal skull discovery in 1848-and the cave complex earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2016. What keeps drawing researchers back is not a single “treasure” find, but the way layered sediments preserve repeated occupation and changing behavior across tens of millennia.
Work in Vanguard Cave, part of that same coastal network, recently pushed that sense of deep time into an almost claustrophobic intimacy. A team widening a sediment plug reached a chamber sealed from the wider cave environment for at least 40,000 years, a space roughly 13 meters across in the roof. Inside lay animal remains-including lynx, spotted hyena, and griffon vulture bones-along with scratched marks on the walls that suggest animals once moved through the chamber. The most telling object was a large dog whelk shell: the chamber sits far from the shoreline today, so a whelk appearing there points to transport rather than tides.
Clive Finlayson, director and chief scientist at the Gibraltar National Museum described the rarity of that moment: “How many times in your life are you going to find something that nobody’s been into for 40,000 years? It only comes once in your lifetime, I think.”
These discoveries highlight an ongoing debate in paleoanthropology: that is, the idea of Neanderthals having died off approximately 40,000 years ago is a neat convenient round number and therefore must be true, while at the same time there exists local site evidence that indicates different groups of Neanderthals survived longer. The site of Gibraltar provides evidence suggesting that Neanderthals may have lived there as late as 33,000 to 24,000 years ago; this creates considerable overlap with the cultural horizons typically associated with Homo sapiens at other sites throughout Europe.
Another disruptive feature of the Gorham’s Cave system in terms of earlier stereotypes is the presence of subsistence strategies and abstract designations on the same ecological landscape. Paleontological excavations conducted in this system have produced remnants of hearths, tools, animal remains (both terrestrial and marine), and also significant quantities of marine resources that would not have occurred naturally. In addition to the above, the designation of a World Heritage Site by UNESCO also indicates that there is evidence of Homo sapiens hunting birds and other marine animals, in addition to the stone engravings that were carved before 39,000 years ago. An example of this engraving is the crosshatch design that was engraved onto the cave’s bedrock, later preserved where there were resting sediments above.
Testing conducted with the crosshatch engraving indicates that it required repeated and intentional implementation of force over time: estimates of the number of strokes required to complete it range from approximately 188 to 317 strokes (using a stone tool); therefore the engraving was not likely a by-product of accidental scraping or likely by accident.
This change in the understanding of how humans applied and transmitted the attention of time, multiple strokes, and their enduring location has been recorded, rather than only the tools that they utilized. This also meant that the central areas of Gorham’s cave were inaccessible.
