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Palaeoanthropology

Return of the last Neanderthal

Nature volume 443, pages 762–763 (2006)Cite this article

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.

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Figure 1: Principal late Neanderthal/Mousterian sites across western Eurasia.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper concerned2 were published online on 13 September 2006.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Lehman College, Bronx, 10468, New York, USA

    Eric Delson

  2. American Museum of Natural History, New York

    Eric Delson

  3. Department of Human Evolution, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, D-04103, Germany

    Katerina Harvati

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  1. Eric Delson
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  2. Katerina Harvati
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Delson, E., Harvati, K. Return of the last Neanderthal. Nature 443, 762–763 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05207

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