Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / October 2006

19 October 2006

Rock on

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Identifying the precise point when a species went extinct is probably impossible. You can never be sure that a fossil is the very last of its kind. The extinction of the Neanderthals in Europe is a case in point, but Finlayson et al. have gone further than anyone in their study of the Neanderthal occupation of Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, showing that Neanderthals occupied this most southerly point of Europe as recently as 28,000 years ago, long after Neanderthals elsewhere in southwest Europe appear to have become extinct.

News and Views: Palaeoanthropology: Return of the last Neanderthal
New finds from Gibraltar date Mousterian tools to as recently as 28,000 years ago. By inference, their Neanderthal makers survived in southern Iberia long after all other well-dated occurrences of the species.

Eric Delson and Katerina Harvati

doi:10.1038/443762a

Full Text | PDF (326K)

Letter: Late survival of Neanderthals at the southernmost extreme of Europe
Clive Finlayson, Francisco Giles Pacheco, Joaquín Rodríguez-Vidal, Darren A. Fa, José María Gutierrez López, Antonio Santiago Pérez, Geraldine Finlayson, Ethel Allue, Javier Baena Preysler, Isabel Cáceres, José S. Carrión, Yolanda Fernández Jalvo, Christopher P. Gleed-Owen, Francisco J. Jimenez Espejo, Pilar López, José Antonio López Sáez, José Antonio Riquelme Cantal, Antonio Sánchez Marco, Francisco Giles Guzman, Kimberly Brown, Noemí Fuentes, Claire A. Valarino, Antonio Villalpando, Christopher B. Stringer, Francisca Martinez Ruiz and Tatsuhiko Sakamoto

doi:10.1038/nature05195

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (381K) | Supplementary information

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek