Thoracic vertebra of juvenile common dolphin from Vanguard cave (Images: Clive Finlayson, Gibraltar Museum) Views of caves in which the finds were made. Left to right: Bennett’s, Gorham’s, Vanguard (Images: Clive Finlayson, Gibraltar Museum)

They may not have used clubs, but Neanderthals hunted seals too. Anthropologists have discovered ancient seal bones showing signs of butchery, as well as some dolphin remains, in two caves in Gibraltar.

The discovery bolsters the image of Neanderthals as intelligent and adaptable hunters, rather than knuckle-dragging brutes, says Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum.

Finlayson was part of an international team of anthropologists who discovered and analysed the marine mammal bones.


“Neanderthals could not have been that stupid and dumb,” he says. “These people probably had a pretty good knowledge of the seasons and when to go hunting.”

Finlayson and his colleague Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo, of Madrid’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, discovered the bones in two cliff-base caves overlooking the Atlantic Ocean: Gorham’s cave and Vanguard cave.

The sites, dating to around 40,000 years ago, also contain signs of hearths, tool-making and the remains of molluscs, boars and bears.

Yet the bones of seals and two species of dolphins are a something of a mystery, Finlayson says. The seal bones, at least, have cut marks indicating they were butchered. “We can pretty confidently say they’re eating them,” he says. But the dolphin bones show no signs butchery, perhaps because the Neanderthals hunted them for fat.

‘Mixed economy’

Even more mysterious is how Neanderthals managed to capture seals and dolphins, says Erik Trinkaus, a human palaeontologist at Washington University in St Louis, who was not involved in the study. “Seals have a very good escape mechanism. It’s called swimming,” he says.

Neanderthals may have hunted young seals during the breeding season, when they were more likely to be found near land, while beached dolphins would have been easy prey for the spear-wielding hunters.

“We’re not good in the water. These are large, and I imagine to them, delicious animals with lots of fat content,” adds Pat Shipman, a palaeoanthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

The variety of animals found in the caves might also explain why coastal-dwelling Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula survived long after their inland brethren went extinct.

“What I think this shows is that they had a mixed economy,” Finlayson says. “If you had series of years with droughts and there was a shortage of deer or goats, you had fallbacks.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805474105)

Evolution – Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.

Human Evolution – Follow the incredible story in our comprehensive special report.