Editor's Summary

13 September 2007

Under the weather

Attempts to place stone-age events in climatic context are hampered by the difficulty of calibrating the radiocarbon calendar beyond 21,000 radiocarbon years ago, and the lack of a 'master' chronology for climate events. But there is a way round this problem: radiocarbon years can be related to palaeoclimate via the excellent Cariaco Basin deep-sea record. In this way, the disappearance of Neanderthals in Europe can be related to known climatic events. Applying this analysis to dates linked to Neanderthal artefacts from Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, suggests that they survived there up to the onset of a major environmental shift.

Letter: Placing late Neanderthals in a climatic context

P. C. Tzedakis, K. A. Hughen, I. Cacho & K. Harvati

doi:10.1038/nature06117

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