Back in August of this year, two words I frequently encountered when trying to visit sites of interest in Andalucía, southern Spain, were“Cerrado” (closed) and “No”, which as a tourist you take in your stride, leg it to the nearest hostelry and reconsider the rest of the day from the perspective of its slightly less interesting alternatives. As an eminent archaeologist working on what is potentially one of the more important sites in Spanish archaeology, with the prospect of confirming the latest known Neanderthals to have lived anywhere in the world, you might hope for more positive words from those tasked with permitting your work to go ahead unhindered. But as we see from the sorry tale unfolding below, this is not always the case, especially where the cave of La Carihuela is concerned.
Martin Cagliani at Mundo Neandertal points us towards this story, in which Spanish archaeologists are complaining that the local Junta (legislative assembly) of Andalucía will not allow the re-excavation of the Mousterian layers in the cave which it closed in 1996, (although work seems to have been conducted at least as late as 1998 by Carrión, linked PDF, Fig.2) where it is claimed there are Neanderthal remains dating to around 21,500 years bp, located within the cave of La Carihuela, about 45 km from Granada. If confirmed, this would make these Neanderthals far younger even than those whose artefactual traces have been found at Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar dating to around 24,500 bp, at the same time perhaps taking the species’ existence right up to the Last Glacial Maximum.
The news article referred to is in Spanish, and is reported at Público.es, from which I’ll roughly translate some of the more pertinent points, while there’s also a freely accessible paper (PDF) on the subject of pollen sequences in the cave, as well as a description of its layout, the stratigraphic sequences within the galleries, published in 2006, to which I’ll briefly refer throughout.
The report begins by describing how the cave might be the site of the very last Neanderthals tthat once walked this planet, because following the discovery of a male (Neanderthal) skull back in the 1950s, in the vicinity of Mousterian stone tools, it was realised shortly thereafter that according to pollen analyses, the layer from which the fossil had been retrieved might date to as late as 21,500 years bp.
Excavations began in earnest during the late 1970s, and by the early 1990s, a team of 30 researchers were working there, putting it on a par with Atapuerca, near Burgos in the north, for the amount of effort invested in the site. But in 1996, following what is described as an arbitrary decision by local authorities, this work came to a sudden halt, and despite repeated requests from the archaeological community to reopen the cave, the Junta has remained obstinately silent on the case, allegedly not even picking up the phone to engage in the debate, according to D. Gerardo Vega Toscano. Profesor Titular, Dpto. de Prehistoria. UCM, Madrid.
He remarks that the scientists in this case are effectively at the mercy of the politicians, who basically don’t give two hoots whether the cave is the last refuge of the Neanderthals, or simply a hole in the ground.
One wonders from reading this whether the Junta is a fit and appropriate body to hold sway over such affairs, and moreover where the Spanish Ministry of Culture stands in this – surely it should be they who decide the scientific importance and appropriate funding levels required by such sites, and I find it hard to believe that no-one from the Ministry has seen fit to intervene.
Vega Toscano is for his part unconvinced of the very late date of 21,500 bp proposed for the remains, which he cites as absurd, opining instead that a date of 28,000 years bp is a more realistic proposition – it should be noted here that the estimate based on the pollen samples uses 28,440 bp and 21,430 bp as its parameters, with the real date presumably falling somewhere in between the two. The oldest known actual remains of Neanderthals are from Zafarraya, occupied between 31,000-27,000 bp, and the remains at La Carihuela should provide secure dates assuming that the specimens are in good enough condition.
Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar is also known as a late Neanderthal refuge, with a most recent date of 24,500 bp ascribed there to Mousterian artefacts, while in Portugal at Lagar Velho, what appear to be the remains of a hybrid Neanderthal child are also put at 24,500 bp, so there seems no reason why a similar date shouldn’t apply at La Carihuela, and maybe 21,500 years bp, or a millennium or two beforehand, in the overall context isn’t completely out of the question. The fact that Mousterian technologies appear to have continued to be employed right up to the very end is interesting in itself, suggesting a lack of contact between archaic and anatomically modern populations – whether further investigations within Carihuela will reveal late-surviving Neanderthals were using bone or antler implements in addition to their own Mousterian tool-kits remains to be seen, but seems doubtful.
Contrary to the opinions of Vega Toscano, there is however support for the much later Neanderthal survival dates, as the article goes on to report the opinions of José Carrión, Professor of Botany at the University of Murcia, who remarks that 21,000 years bp marks the start of the Glacial Maximum, when temperatures plunged ever deeper for the following 3,000 years, a situation he believes could have tipped Neanderthals over the edge, coinciding with the extinction of fauna such as the mastodon and sabre-toothed tiger. (Although Neanderthals had previously survived through at least 2 previous ice ages, they had done so in the absence of competition from AMH, and as far as I’m aware, no major faunal extinctions had taken place in the earlier glaciations either, or at least not to the extent that Neanderthal prey animals disappeared from the menu).
Carrión further makes the point that apart from pollen dating, the bones from La Carihuela can be dated, and so might yet reveal themselves to be younger than the Gorham’s Cave presence – whether the fossil skull mentioned earlier has been dated isn’t stated here, and whether it continues to languish unexamined in a Granada museum, isn’t clear. Other researchers have dismissed the idea that climate alone could have accounted for the demise of the Neanderthals, preferring instead to cite a multitude of inter-related factors.
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it through. Molly Fox et al turn their thoughts to the question of why women are able to live for many years after they able to conceive offspring, a phenomenon seemingly at odds with the idea that members of a species tend to die off once their reproductive days are over.
