Gorham’s Cave Complex a hub for biodiversity, both now and in times gone by, studies find

By Neve Clinton

Stewart Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar National Museum’s Natural History Department, and the Gorham’s Cave Complex excavations, spoke to the Chronicle about recent findings at the site, revealing that the area is - and always has been - home to a wide range of wildlife, with some endangered species booming recently.

Mr Finlayson explained that since the Gorham’s Cave Complex was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016, the area has been highly protected, with limited numbers of visitors allowed to enter each year.

“The area is very secure. We have a security company, believe it or not, watching these cliffs all day… we have this camera system, which is constantly watching, and if people do get too close, they call the police immediately”, he said.

He assured that the reason for this is not to discourage visitors, but to keep the area as safe as possible and to protect conservation efforts, adding that he encourages those interested to visit, as long as it is arranged officially through the museum.

“We just have to be very careful how we do it. There's a limit to how many people can come down, simply because if you bring too many people, it'll start destroying and eroding the cave, the deposits. So the waiting list at the moment, we've brought it down substantially, it used to be close to six years, it's currently at about three years.”

“There is a lot of interest. People are coming constantly”, he said, including locals and visitors from abroad.

“This summer we already had a man from America, who flew over just because it was his time for his booking for the tour”.

“We try to get through [the waiting list] as best as we can”, but, because winter is not a good time to bring big groups of people down to the site, they only have the small window of the summer months to work with.

As a result of this sparsity of visits, the natural environment has been able to flourish, Mr Finlayson said:

“When it was handed over to us, which was a few years before 2016, that was when no one was going in except us, and very sporadically, not very often. It was summer, basically. So what we started noticing was, if you leave the site alone, the wildlife starts booming back really, really quickly.”

As an evolutionary biologist, this means a lot to him. He spoke with a sense of pride about this booming biodiversity being a major success story for the site, and explained the importance of such biodiversity for the food chain, which encourages wildlife further:

“We have a huge amount of lizards, things like that, which are around us. Huge amounts of insects, which people may not find as fun, but they're extremely important in what's happening here, because it's the food source of many other things.”

Furthermore, there is also a large community of birds, including shags, peregrine falcons, crag martins and an eagle owl, “which is a massive owl, it's the biggest one. Beautiful thing. He's living here, eating off gulls, luckily for us”.

The shag, or green cormorant, population being studied on-site is the very endangered Mediterranean subspecies, called the Desmaresti variant, which is “actually booming completely” in Gibraltar, with the next breeding population found in Barcelona, signalling a huge absence.

He highlighted, “I believe it was two years ago, one pair had seven chicks, which is unheard of, and they're doing really well every year.”

“It's really encouraging. They're using different areas that we have along here on the cliff face, doing really well.”

As for the migratory crag martins, which live inside the caves, “there's between 20,000 and 30,000 that come here. So that's about 3% of the entire European population ends up in these two caves, which is absolutely bonkers”.

The coastline is also highly populated with marine molluscs which are severely endangered elsewhere but are thriving at the site due to the fact that the area is protected, preventing people from fishing or picking any of these animals off the rocks.

Despite the fact that the Gibraltar Neanderthals inhabited was “very different to ours in the sense that the animals out here, you would have had wolf, hyaena, lion, bear, all of these animals competing out here trying to get inside,” the Gorham’s Cave Complex, and the Rock more generally, was clearly the perfect breeding ground for biodiversity.

The excavations at Neanderthal Grotto, a smaller cavern within Vanguard Cave’s opening, have discovered large numbers of marine shells with taphonomic marks, showing evidence of Neanderthals harvesting and scraping them for food, as well as tools, bones and even “a massive deer antler”, which is now on display in the museum.

They have also found the skeleton of an “entire eagle owl, still in anatomical connection, which is very interesting”, said Mr Finlayson.

Speaking about the concentration of Neanderthal evidence found in the two smaller caverns within Vanguard Cave, Hyaena Cave and Neanderthal Grotto which sit side by side, Mr Finlayson highlighted:

“Gorham's and Vanguard are renowned, anywhere in the world, for the density of material that comes out when excavated. This leaves the other places in its shadow, totally.”

“To tell you that we have tens of thousands of remains, be it stone tools, shells, and bones, all from that tiny little area, in two very short campaigns that we've done there, is probably not doing it justice.”

He also highlighted one of the levels excavated from the 18m high sand dune pushed up against the entrance of Vanguard Cave as a “moment in the life”, a depiction of a moment in time revealing Neanderthal lifestyle habits, perfectly preserved in a layer of sand.

From the archaeologists’ interpretations, “a family of Neanderthals came here, it was very sandy, they got probably some shells, marine molluscs and so on from the beach, sat down, had a meal, the tools and so on, so you can literally see what was happening”.

“A group of people, they made some tools, they sat down, they had some food, and then they left, and the sand again kept pushing, the wind and the sand started covering it again, and that is what archaeology is all about.”

Mr Finlayson also told the Chronicle that the museum is now collaborating with researchers using cutting-edge techniques to extract and analyse DNA directly from soil and sand, allowing them to identify animals or Neanderthals that would have inhabited a given area, without needing to find physical remains.

“So a lot of the stuff that we're doing in Vanguard, a year ago or two years ago would have been total science fiction. In fact, I can't believe I'm saying some of these things, because two years ago I would have said that anyone would have been bonkers suggesting the idea of some of this stuff.”

“But it's true, it is happening.”

He added that the museum was “working with the world's leading labs” to push the boundaries of this pioneering work, and that members of the public who are interested in the findings should “watch this space”.