Science Daily looks at the vacation habits of Neanderthals on Jersey:
As part of a re-examination of La Cotte de St Brelade and its surrounding landscape, archaeologists from Southampton, together with experts from three other universities and the British Museum, have taken a fresh look at artefacts and mammoth bones originally excavated from within the site’s granite cliffs in the 1970s.
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Lead author Dr Andy Shaw of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO) at the University of Southampton said: “La Cotte seems to have been a special place for Neanderthals. They kept making deliberate journeys to reach the site over many, many generations. We can use the stone tools they left behind to map how they were moving through landscapes, which are now beneath the English Channel. 180,000 years ago, as ice caps expanded and temperatures plummeted, they would have been exploiting a huge offshore area, inaccessible to us today.”
Previous research focussed on particular levels in the site where mammoth bones are concentrated, but this new study took a longer-term perspective, looking at how Neanderthals used it and explored the surrounding landscape for over 100,000 years.
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Dr Beccy Scott of the British Museum added: “We’re really interested in how this site became ‘persistent’ in the minds of early Neanderthals. You can almost see hints of early mapping in the way they are travelling to it again and again, or certainly an understanding of their geography. But specifically what drew them to Jersey so often is harder to tease out. It might have been that the whole Island was highly visible from a long way off — like a waymarker — or people might have remembered that shelter could be found there, and passed that knowledge on.”