The Humans Who Went Extinct by Clive Finlayson

Author:Clive Finlayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191579899
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Figure 11 Rock of Gibraltar with Gorham’s cave, where the last Neanderthals lived, at the base (second large cave from left). Above, present day with high sea levels; below, the predominant situation when Neanderthals lived in the cave, with sea levels lowered by up to 120 metres below present level, exposing a huge shelf where the Neanderthals foraged

Photo credit: Clive Finlayson; reconstruction: Stewart Finlayson.

Many of the fossil plants and animals identified from the various levels are excellent indicators of climate. Among the plants the olive, the stone pine, and the lentisc are evidence of a warm Mediterranean climate. Among the animals, the Hermann’s tortoise needs a mean annual temperature of 14°C for its eggs to hatch and it does not tolerate rainfall in excess of 700 millimetres per annum. Many species can be used in this way. Putting the climate tolerances of each of them for a particular level together allows us to say, with some confidence, what the climatic conditions outside the cave were when these animals lived there. The staggering conclusion when all the results were pooled together was that for the greater part of the past 125 thousand years the climate was almost the same as it is outside the cave today. At times it was slightly cooler and drier and at other times it was slightly wetter but overall it changed little.7 These findings are hugely significant when we bear in mind the kinds of rapid and intense climate changes that, as we saw in the previous chapter, engulfed northern Eurasia, especially after 50 thousand years ago. It seems that the deep south-west of Europe remained largely unaffected by these changes. This conclusion was supported by the complete absence of any of the steppe–tundra mammals ranging widely further north. No woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, reindeer, musk ox, steppe bison, saiga antelope, cave bear, or arctic fox ever reached these latitudes. This was indeed another world, a piece of Africa in Europe as Chapman had proposed.

The plant and animal remains also provide us with very clear indications of the kinds of habitats outside the cave. For over ten years my wife Geraldine and I travelled the length and breadth of the Iberian Peninsula with one purpose in mind. We would sample the rich variety of habitats of Iberia, from the frozen wastes of the peaks of the Pyrenees to the warm Mediterranean woods of the south-west, from the humid forests of Cantabria in the north-west to the deserts of Almería in the south-east.8 We would stop at particular locations and record the nature of the vegetation within an area of a hectare. Our measurements included the kinds of plants that we found and the structure of the habitat.9

We did this for one thousand plots, which gave us a fantastic database of information. Birds were easily observed during our work so we added estimates of the numbers of each species observed in each plot to our catalogue. We could work out, for example, the kind of habitat in which a particular bird lived? and also the limits of its tolerance today.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.