Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave in Jersey, according to a new study which suggests that the site was a 'special place' for our prehistoric ancestors.
As part of a re-examination of La Cotte de St Brelade and its surrounding landscape in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands located between England and France, researchers have taken a fresh look at artefacts and mammoth bones originally excavated from within the site's granite cliffs in the 1970s.
The researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK matched types of stone raw material used to make tools to detailed mapping of the geology of the sea bed, and studied in detail how they were made, carried and modified.
This helped reconstruct a picture of what resources were available to Neanderthals over tens of thousands of years - and where they were travelling from.
"La Cotte seems to have been a special place for Neanderthals," said lead author Andy Shaw from University of Southampton.
"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," said Shaw.
"180,000 years ago, as ice caps expanded and temperatures plummeted, they would have been exploiting a huge offshore area, inaccessible to us today," Shaw added.
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.
Researchers, also from the British Museum, University College London (UCL) and the University of Wales in the UK found that Neanderthals kept coming back to this particular place, despite globally significant changes in climate and landscape.
During glacial phases (Ice Ages), they travelled to the site over cold, open landscapes, now submerged under the sea.
They kept visiting as the climate warmed up and Jersey became a striking highpoint in a wide coastal plain connected to France.
"We are 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," said Beccy Scott from the British Museum.
"However, 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," said Scott.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity.
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