[ Music ]
Clive Finlayson is Director of the Gibraltar Museum,
and one of the world's foremost experts on the behavior
of the latest Neandertals.
He took me into Gorham's cave at the base of the Rock
of Gibraltar, and in the back of the cave,
where some of the most interesting evidence
of late Neandertals have been found, we had a conversation
about how Neandertals were fitting into their ecology
and what factors may have led to their disappearance.
We're here in the Gorham's cave, and this is the place right now,
where we have the most recent dates
for Neandertals anywhere in the world.
That's right.
It came as a surprise to us.
Back in 2005, it was published in '06,
we weren't looking for late Neandertals.
We just decided that this part
of the cave never had been excavated.
And we went through a series of levels,
there's four levels here, identifiable,
the most recent one at the top is Phoenician-Carthaginian,
then you've got a Neolithic level,
then you've got a Paleolithic represented by Magdalenian
and Solutrean, and below you have the Neandertal level
with Mousterian.
And we came across a hearth, in that corner down there,
you know, like the ones that you see in our site, that kind of,
real structure, structured hearth, so we decided to,
to radio-carbon date, so we sent some, from the different parts
of each, of the hearth, some charcoals for dating.
And when the results came back, we thought now, this was wrong,
precisely because they looked very young.
So we just kept quiet about this and came back
and took more samples, and did it again.
And the same results came back.
And, you know, we're still working in this level and,
and other things, we're trying to use other techniques,
as well, to, to date the level, to strengthen that information,
but we're very confident that we have here is at the time we,
we published it as 28,000 years ago,
those are un-calibrated dates, because the,
the calibration curve for that period was not available,
and now it is.
So, basically, those dates now translate
to around 31-32,000 years ago.
And that just still makes them the, the last known Neandertals
to have lived on the planet,
it doesn't mean the last Neandertals lived here
necessarily, but it's where the evidence is and, you know,
we think that this reflects a refuge, a coastal refuge,
that would probably stretch from here to Portugal,
which had a lot of advantages promoting late survival
and also survival of many other species.
This cannot be seen out of context, in ecological terms.
Lots of species that, later on, recolonize Europe,
parts of Europe, literally survived
through the glacial periods in this part of the world.
And there, we've got a lot of strong evidence from pollen,
from marine mollusks, from the fauna, that shows that even
at the heights of the glacial maximum, when, you know,
Britain was 2 kilometers at the rise and, and the buildup
to that, which when the Neandertals go extinct,
you know, you might have that,
you don't find a single wooly mammoth here.
You don't find a reindeer, nothing representative
of cold fauna reaches this.
And they're close by,
but they're not here in the, in the coast.
And yet, you have olives growing,
and you have all the species which are indicators,
Hermann's tortoise which needs 17 Celsius annual temperature
to reproduce, they're still here.
So, so this idea of a refuge fits
in with this late Neandertal survival.
But we found it here, and then we started to think, well,
you know, why was this place so important
for the Neandertals' location,
because the dates weren't just 32, they'd gone to 33, 34, 35,
so they keep coming over and over
and using this, this fire, now.
For some, most Neandertal sites, I think the hearths tend
to be like, like the entrance of Gorham's,
they tend to be on the outside.
You don't want to smoke in your rock shelter
or your cave, but here they do.
We're quite deep in the cave here.
Yeah, we are probably a hundred meters
from the entrance, longer maybe.
Well, yeah, there's a significance difference
in distance, I mean, maybe, maybe 50 to 60 meters, at least.
And you can see the light, even now, comes into the back
of the cave, why would you put a fire here?
Well, it's the narrowest point in the cave,
so that may give you a hint, and what would happen to the smoke?
Well, if we go look right out, it's like a natural chimney.
So the smoke would have risen that way.
So, it would be a good place, with hyenas roaming up there
and leopards and all kinds of wolves, to retire to,
even when you got activities outside, retire to the night,
light the fire, you're not going
to smoke yourself in, and you're protected.
But it looks pretty confined in here for a group,
but of course it wasn't like this, because if you look
in there, okay, this is what Captain Gorham found in 1907.
That's, you need to crawl through,
Geraldine did it many years ago, I haven't actually gone
to the end because it's extremely narrow,
but what we're doing is excavating down, and that goes
on for 35 meters - another 35 meters.
So there would have been a huge chamber here
where the Neandertals would have had relative comfort and safety.
So we think that's the story.
But the story doesn't end there.
You know, if we forgot Neandertals and modern humans,
their taxonomy, just think of people.
What happens?
Well, these early people, the Neandertals disappear one day,
they don't come back, later on after a break,
other people come Solutreans, modern humans,
some people would like to call them.
People, and they do almost the same, because look, here's,
we haven't excavated yet, there's that structure there,
it's a hearth, we can even see bones there, little rabbit
or something, so they're putting a fire almost
in the same position, probably for similar reasons.
And if you crawl to the back of the cave, it's very exciting,
because what you find at the back there is, so far,
there's this painted stack, beautiful,
like the ones you would see in Northern Spain and France,
and two hands, you know, these negative, where then,
people have, then you know,
in the children's hands, on charcoal.
And we haven't published this yet, but there's no mystery
to this, but we took a sample from that,
and it gives a date of 20,000.
So 20,000 years ago, the Solutreans came
and replaced the Neandertal or, or came after the Neandertals.
We're almost doing the same thing
as the Neandertals were doing before them.
Just the context right?
20,000 years ago, less glacial maximum,
you've got the same situation as had recurred, you know,
again and again, and again, you've got people down here,
they're using this because it is a kind of place
where people can live, yeah.
Yeah, and when you look at, for example, the,
the profile of the bones that come out with cutmarks,
the species, compositions and so on, the shellfish, you know,
the mollusks that, that Darren's been looking at,
the plants that Geraldine's been looking at.
If you were given, if you looked at the modern human level,
shall we say, and the proceeding Neandertal level,
and you weren't told which it was,
there is no practically no difference.
The, the correlations are, you know, the,
the variance explained, this is close to 90 percent.
I mean, it's, you couldn't tell the difference,
maybe the paintings on the walls, other than that,
you couldn't tell the difference from the foreigner
and the, the processing of.
Right. There are different traditions.
They're different peoples, you know, even, even if,
even if Neandertals contributed to later people, they're,
they're far apart in time.
They're not, they're not [pause] information inheritors,
of the Neandertals, necessarily,
but they're ecological inheritors in the sense
that they're using the same stuff.
Yeah, I mean, they may have had different fashions,
cultural differences, which we sometimes confuse
for biological differences, after all, you know,
we talking thousands of years later,
but faced with similar ecology, the solutions are going
to be very similar, and essentially, they go out,
look out of the window, and they have a choice, and they exploit
that choice, in a very similar way.
Aand I think that when we look at past interpretations
of subsistance strategies in Neandertals versus modern humans
and so on, very often, we are confusing context with taxonomy,
or with, with the phylogenetics if you like, and very often,
what you see, the differences have more to do with the place
and the way things are exploited rather than who they are.
When you come to places like this,
where the context changes little, the taxonomy changes,
but the way of exploiting the environment is very similar.
So with humans, when we talk
about human biology being a combination of genes
and environment, we could also maybe extend to say when we look
at human behavior, in the archeological context, it's,
it's not only a combination of, of genes and environment,
you know, the psychological systems and so on, it's also,
very particularly, the microenvironment.
So around this site there are certain kinds of activities
that make sense and you see those sites being used
for that reason.
It, it sounds deterministic, which pushes it up to a point,
but it's, it's more about having a choice and exploiting
that choice as an intelligence hominin,
and very often you're going to be doing similar things,
because, because of the choices that are available to you.
So you, your able to, to, but, by and large,
the ecology tends to, in some way guide you, and,
and it's, it's the 'larder' .
You've got a larder up there, and it's like at home, you know,
you open the fridge and you have certain things.
And one day you might choose one or might choose another,
but you're going to be eating what's in the fridge
or what's in the supermarket.
So it's similar.
So, why are we not Neandertals?
You know, what, what accounts for the fact
that Neandertals had their time and,
and then later you see different kinds of people here?
Yeah, I mean, there's some would argue that there's an element
of Neandertals in us still today.
Well there absolutely is, right?
Your, you, everybody watching this is going
to know my attitude about this, so, so [laughter].
But it would mean that Neandertals didn't disappear,
but I think we would agree that the phenotype.
That's it, yeah.
Of the Neandertal is no longer around.
That's right.
That was a population that had its day.
And, and its day ended, and, and that, I think, is so fascinating
to people, obviously, but, but in a way, fundamentally,
you know, this place is maybe the most information we have
anywhere about it.
I mean, the point is why did they disappear, and, well,
we assume, maybe
from present-day genetics looking backwards,
that we were our species was successful,
but how many population, of our populations never made it,
I mean, the Neandertals never made it,
so, for similar reasons.
So to what degree has this got to do with being good or bad
or simply the luck of the draw?
I think a lot of it had to with the luck of the draw.
I'm a great believer that the chance events
in small population can make a difference.
And I think these,
these Neandertal populations had been hit hard
across the continent over and over again by climate change,
to a large degree, altering their habitats,
altering the way, you know, the, the kind of environments
that they were good at exploiting, until you ended
up with a series of population, maybe one here,
maybe one here [inaudible], maybe one somewhere else,
maybe one in Siberia, we don't know.
And, and the point is, it's like pandas or tigers,
once your population's reached such low numbers,
even if the conditions are good out there, you're living dead,
you're going to go extinct for, for, purely for genetic reason,
inbreeding or numbers, you're numbers are so small that one
of these random fluctuations and you're out,
and there's no recovery from extinction.
Once you go below 0, then that's it, or you reach 0.
This is what we call an absorbing state [laughter].
So, but there were other populations,
and one of those happened to expand,
or a series of them expanded and colonized certain parts
of Europe, and made it through that particular stage.
I don't think we need to look further than that.
I think that's a huge element of that.
You have a lot of populations of people, some characteristic,
with a characteristic of Neandertals.
Probably with their morphology better suited to sort of kind
of ambush hunting in, in the kind of environments
that we had up to Gorham's cave.
Maybe they weren't so good as large-scale roaming
over the open steppes, treeless steppes, maybe there was a,
a mechanical constraint there or [inaudible] constraint.
Maybe some of these other people may be coming from the plains
in Africa or somewhere, where, I hate to use the word adaptive,
but their morphology was better suited to large-scale roaming,
and at a particular time
when open steppe habitats were spreading, they,
they reached all the way to, to Central Spain.
I mean, you would get saiga antelopes, which you have to go
to Central Asia to find, you find the evidence of them there.
Or they were just tracking resources,
the kinds of resources and the way of life that,
that these other people, but the story here shows you
something else.
When those, people used to exploiting these open plains
and so on, come to this kind of environment,
they adopt the Neandertal way.
Yeah, yeah.
So there is that flexibility, as well.
Context again.
Now, before we leave this part of the cave, I just want to ask
about Carthaginians, because this cave is, you know,
has continuously been open to the outside
and people have used this cave throughout the ages and,
in particular, in historic times, so, we're famously on one
of the Pillars of Hercules [laughing],
and there were rituals going on in here.
Yeah, this is the exciting thing,
when you start working here, the very top, the most recent level,
we've got a very well dated, it starts in the 8th century, BC,
through till the time of the Romans in the 2nd century.
And people are coming here.
First it's Phoenicians from present day Lebanon,
[inaudible], they're coming all the way here.
And then the Carthaginians' they set up their, their descendants
in Carthage and near Tunisia, and the Western Mediterranean,
and it seems that, you know, this is one of the columns.
The other one is in North Africa.
It's very visible, it's the end of the world.
In theory, because we know they're going across,
so you have to make offerings and, and worship.
A lot of intact ceramics, a lot of votive offerings, scarabs,
show an international dimension to the cave.
But the time, of course, the sea level is where it tis now,
so they were beaching the boats and coming up.
But you find Corinthian, Athenian ceramics, you find some
of the scarabs or, or the Egyptian hieroglyphs,
so it's from, you know, it, it's a shrine to the gods,
possibly [inaudible] the precursor of Heracles
and eventually Hercules,
so the columns may have been initially a male cat, but,
you know, I, I see something here that also tells me
about the human mind, and how little it's changed the way
we think.
It's quite clear that the Carthaginians were going beyond
the end of the world.
It's quite clear they were going and, and trading with the,
the native peoples for metals and minerals.
There may have been an element of perpetuating the myth,
perpetuating the myth to corner of the markets.
And prevent the Greeks and others from going beyond the end
of the world [laughter], so this,
this may have a greater significance
than the purely spiritual and religious, but that's my take.
They were like paleoanthropologists [laughter].
Perpetuate the myth that things were very rare
and we should keep them hidden so that we can have them.
So anyway, so that's, that's my take on it.
But the fact is it's nice to have a cave with, you know,
it's 18 meters in vertical deposit, we know so far.
16 and a half of those are Neandertals.
Then you've got maybe another bit, which is modern human,
pre and post glaciation, maybe have a bit of Neolithic,
and that at the end of this, the little icing on the cake,
that little, thin layer which represents 400-500 years
of these people coming here.
And here we are living on top of our history, as we always do.
This is our little time machine.
This is the nearest thing we've got to, to time traveling.
Okay, alright.