Neanderthal neighbours: tracing evidence for our closest hominin relatives in Britain

Above This drawing depicts the Forbes’ Quarry skull (also known as Gibraltar 1), the first adult Neanderthal remains ever discovered. The skull was found in Gibraltar in 1848 eight years before the type specimen that gave Neanderthals their name was discovered in the Neander Valley, Germany and came from a woman aged at least 40. Today, it is held by the Natural History Museum in London.

February 4, 2021

Our ideas about who the Neanderthals were have undergone something of a revolution in the past three decades. Old notions of them as stuck-in-the-muds with limited capacity for innovation – whether in what they ate, their technologies, or how they dealt with the dead – have been overturned by abundant archaeological discoveries. What tends to hit the headlines are dramatic finds, such as the astonishing (and baffling) stalagmite construction made by Neanderthals 174,000 BP (‘Before Present’), deep in Bruniquel cave, France. More often, however, archaeological advances come from less flashy things: slow, gritty work digging sites just a few centimetres deeper each season; developing n

Already a subscriber? Sign in here