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Nature 443, 762-763 (19 October 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05207; Published online 13 September 2006

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Palaeoanthropology: Return of the last Neanderthal

Eric Delson1 & Katerina Harvati2

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New finds from Gibraltar date Mousterian tools to as recently as 28,000 years ago. By inference, their Neanderthal makers survived in southern Iberia long after all other well-dated occurrences of the species.

The last Neanderthals were participants in one of the most dramatic events in the story of human evolution. At a time of increasing climatic instability and environmental deterioration, they would have had to have survived in ever-smaller groups, confined to less environmentally hostile refugia on the coast of the Mediterranean, and competing for access to resources with modern humans pressing on their territory.

  1. Eric Delson is in the Department of Anthropology, Lehman College, Bronx, New York 10468, USA, and at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
    Email: eric.delson@lehman.cuny.edu
  2. Katerina Harvati is in the Department of Human Evolution, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
    Email: harvati@eva.mpg.de

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