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Today
Gorham’s Cave, along with other caves in Gibraltar, is being excavated
by a very varied team of experts under the name Palaeomed. The project
is part funded by the European Community Interreg Programme and the
Gibraltar Government. Its directors are Professor Clive Finlayson of the
Gibraltar Museum, Juaquin Rodriguez Vidal of the University of Huelva
and Francisco Giles Pacheco of the Museo del Puerto Santa Maria.
Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London is
scientific adviser on palaeoanthropology.
Recent studies in the Iberian Peninsula had raised a number of questions
about the co-existence of the last Neanderthals and the earliest Modern
Humans in the region. Dating work at sites in Northern Spain suggested
that manufacturers of Upper Palaeolithic Early Aurignacian industries
were there before 40,000 years ago at El Castillo Cave, based on C14
dates , whilst evidence coming from South of the Ebro in Central and
Southern Spain and Portugal show that the Late Mousterian industries
persisted in these areas until about 30,000 years ago. This would
suggest that there was a period of co-existence between the two forms of
Homo in Iberia and that places in the south might have provided a last
refuge for the Neanderthals from where they did not return. The evidence
from Gibraltar suggests that there was no coexistence and that Modern
People arrived after the Neanderthal extinction. For this reason,
Gibraltar sites have the potential to make a contribution to the debate.
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