Morocco and Eastern Atlantis

Neanderthals at Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar

Researchers working on the Gibraltar promontory have amassed a suite of about 30 AMS radiocarbon dates from stacked Neanderthal occupations at Gorham's Cave that suggest Neanderthals were still living on Gibraltar at about 25,000 years ago, fully 5,000 years after they have been thought to be gone from the world. Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum and colleagues report on their findings in an online article made available on September 13, 2006 and to appear in a future issue of Nature.

The archaeological site of Gorham's Cave is located on the British territory of Gibraltar, that rocky narrow strip of land that extends off Spain and points towards Morocco. Gibraltar overlooks the Strait of Gibraltar, a 14-kilometer wide stretch of open water connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, and separating Europe from northern Africa. Gorham's Cave was discovered in 1907 and first excavated in the 1950s by John Waechter of the Institute of Archaeology in London. In addition to Phoenician, Carthegenian and Neolithic occupations in the cave, there are 16 meters of Pleistocene deposits. The top part of the Pleistocene consists of two Upper Paleolithic deposits, identified as Solutrean and Magdelenian and used by what archaeologists now call Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH). Below that, and reported to be separated by five thousand years is a level of pure Mousterian, and, according to the latest AMS radiocarbon dates, was occupied beween 23,000 and 33,000 years ago.

The cave backdrop is Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar (S. Finlayson). The skull is a CT reconstruction of the Gibraltar Devil's Tower Neanderthal child done by C. Zollikofer and M. Ponce de Leon, Anthropology Dept of the University of Zurich