Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals viewers and lifelong fans of Patrick Stewart have been told a fascinating narrative of our hominid close cousin yet one that includes a completely disproven hypothesis about Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar being one of the final strongholds of Neanderthals 40,000 years ago. At the same time, what had been previously proposed as Neanderthal art at Gorham’s Cave and other locations are missing from the documentary. Is Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals calling out the death of Neanderthal art?
By Bernie Taylor | Bernie’s Blog
Social: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Academia and ResearchGate
Published – May 2024
Gorham’s Cave was introduced in the earlier blogs Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld and Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part II: The Terrestrial Plane as connected to an engraving on the 2023 Netflix series Uknown: Cave of Bones about Homo naledi in the South African Rising Star Cave. The art in Gorham’s Cave, or so called “hashtag” of Neanderthals, is referred to by this blogger as Gorham’s Etching. The evidence in these previous blogs shows that engravings in the Rising Star Cave and Gorham’s Cave were not made by Homo naledi or Neanderthals.
Is this why Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals dropped the so-called Gorham’s Cave Neanderthal “hashtag” from the documentary after filming at the site?
Setting the Stage
Before diving into these Gorham’s Cave narratives, let’s step back to look at the history of site and its strategic modern and prehistoric location on the southeastern side of the Rock of Gibraltar. This iconic monolithic limestone promontory lies on the north shore of a narrow sea passage between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. In ancient times, the Greek philosopher and mathematician Plato referred to this place in his works Timaeus and Critias (360 BCE) as the “Strait of Hercules.” This phrase possibly positioned the Rock of Gibraltar and Jebel (Mt.) Musa in Morocco, western North Africa, as the “Pillars of Hercules” which hold the earth and heavens apart. The edge of the ocean past the Strait was the westernmost limit where the mythological hero Hercules was to have traveled.
On Gibraltar’s southeastern tip is “Gorham’s Cave,” after Captain A. Gorham of the Royal Munster Fusiliers who rediscovered it in 1907 when he opened a fissure in the rear of a sea cavern. The cave had been naturally created by continuous eastern wave action from the Mediterranean Sea. Ocean levels have continued to change and during the last Ice Age that peaked about 26,000 years ago, the cave might have been a few kilometers inland on a coastal plain. Any cave visitor at the time would have been looking at grassland with patchy trees and shrubs, supporting a variety of flora and fauna.
Some archeologists credit Gorham’s Cave as the last known place of Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) occupation in the world. The Neanderthals were named after the site of their modern discovery in Germany’s Neander valley near Düsseldorf. Thal is the older spelling of the German word Tal, which means “valley.” Neanderthals were not alone on the European continent. Homo sapiens, often-called “modern man,” and where our distant ancestors step in, came up from Africa at least by 54,000 years ago and cohabitated the greater region with the Neanderthals.
A handful of archaeologists who are behind the Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals narrative have come to believe that Homo sapiens did not make their mark in Gorham’s Cave until around 20,000 years ago with a painted deer and a handprint. Neolithic shell fishermen entered the cave from 5300 BCE (McCann, B. 2012). Seafaring Phoenicians used the entrance of the site as a coastal shrine between 800 to 400 BCE (UNESCO 2015). Why they chose this site as a place of worship had been previously unknown.
Gorham’s Cave “Hashtag”?
Gorham’s Cave gained international stardom when in the summer of 2014 Clive Finlayson’s team from the Gibraltar National Museum released images of a so-called “hashtag” etching to the world, as pictured in the figure above (Rodriguez-Vidal, J. 2014). Gorham Etching became a subject of awe and debate. As many magazines covered it that might have reported on an unmanned Saturn landing. Two years earlier, the researchers had found the series of deeply incised parallel and crisscrossing lines when they wiped away dirt covering a bedrock surface.
The Gorham Etching sat on a coffee table-like platform that rose almost sixteen inches (40 cm) from the bedrock. Clive Finlayson’s team decidedly determined that the rock had been covered under a layer of sediment and was littered with Mousterian (400,000 – 40,000 years ago) stone tools, a style long linked in Eurasia to Neanderthals. Radiocarbon samples indicate that this sediment layer is between 38,500 and 30,500 years old, suggesting that the etching in the rock buried underneath was created sometime before then. At the time, the so-called “hashtag” was widely attributed as the first known abstract art of Neanderthals.
The Gibraltar National Museum team recreated the horizontal and vertical lines with stone tools. They found that the base straight-line design could have been made with 188 to 317 strokes and the two deep horizontal lines were made before the vertical lines. The project was believed to have required at least an hour’s work (Rodriguez-Vidal, J. 2014). The archeologists studied the minerals of the rock and natural surface contamination. Their work was a micro view study of how the lines were engraved. The researchers definitively determined that the etching was not an act of nature.
The scientific debate outside of Clive Finlayson’s Gibraltar National Museum team was not as to how the etching was made, but rather the identity of the artists who created the cross hatched pattern. Were they Neanderthals or Homo sapiens? If the being responsible for the marks made them intentionally, what might the strokes mean or represent? Could the cross-hatched pattern be a primitive hash tag or property marker whose symbolism was only understood by a local clan?
There were many ideas as to the nature of the etching, yet no suggestion was scientifically validated. No images of bison, horses, stenciled hands, or other typical characters from Paleolithic Homo sapiens sites were brought to the public’s attention. Some archaeologists called the Gorham’s Cave engraving “ambiguous,” which was deserving, as Clive Finlayson’s Gibraltar National Museum team apparently made no attempt to study the panel for any figurative characters.
Team Neanderthal
Proponents of Neanderthal authorship, who call themselves “Team Neanderthal,” draw on the lack of archeological evidence for Homo sapiens in the area of Gorham’s Cave at the time the image was engraved and their believed absence of typical Homo sapiens characters. Team Neanderthal doesn’t need proof of anything. They “feel” and “imagine” that Neanderthal evidence will ultimately emerge.
Prominent media outlets have brought both sides of the story into the Gorham’s Cave discussion. Nature journalist Ewen Callaway interviewed two researchers who were not involved in the project, but who have extensive experience in the field.
Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, says that the engravings, if made by Neanderthals, represent a very important find. “It adds permanent rock engraving to the sparse but significant evidence for Neanderthal symbolic behaviour.” Ochre pigment, shell beads and other adornments have also been used to back the idea that Neanderthals possessed the sorts of symbolic cognitive powers that underlie language and religion. But Harold Dibble, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has misgivings about the engraving, as well as the identity of its maker. Sediments tend to shift around a cave, and it is possible that humans made the etchings, only for them to be later covered up by older sediments from prior Neanderthal occupations, he says. Moreover, Dibble questions the importance of abstract scratching, which also appear on animal bones at Neanderthal sites. “It takes more than a few scratches — deliberate or not — to identify symbolic behaviour on the part of Neanderthals.” (Callaway, E. 2014)
There has been no argument as to whether these are intentional engravings or forces of nature. The research team has made a strong case. The stratigraphic dating problem in the cave is that the Gorham Etching is within a few inches of the top layer on a raised bedrock platform. This top layer is dated from 35,000 years before present. However, the upper layer sediments could have shifted, as the late Harrold Dibble, who was obviously not a Team Neanderthal devotee noted, making any layer within the first few feet a dateable data point for the etching. The layers of sediment in the cave are not level and show clear shifting.
Cover-Up?
This blogger takes note that the image of the Gorham Etching distributed to the press from the start of Clive Finlayson and his Gibraltar National Museum team’s alleged great discovery to the present is dirt covered, as pictured above. The dirt covered and hashtag graphic, as previously pictured, are the only images that have been publicized by Clive Finlayson and the Gibraltar National Museum since release of the initial paper. Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals doesn’t provide us with a clean version of the Gorham Etching either. This dirt covered image can be visually compared with the cleaned artifact. There are dramatic differences in detail between the two. The absence of detail to the public limited any serious independent or objective analysis. A cover up? Perhaps not at first but surely as time passed and alternative interpretations of the cleaned image emerged.
Another challenge in dating Gorham Etching by the soil layer is that the highest levels of sediment are not required for its use, making any layer of material an uncertain dateable point. The Gorham Etching could just as easily have been made at the twenty-foot beach level either 120,000 years ago or 35,000 years ago. Clive Finlayson and his Gibraltar National Museum study group chose a layer that was five meters (16.5 feet) deeper at the center of the cavern but less than a hand’s depth at the etching, as described in the illustration above.
The assumed date by the Clive Finlayson and the Gibraltar Museum researchers for the etching is approximately 40,000 years ago, which is the line that Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals draws at for their final days at Gibraltar. Cut-off dates matter in archaeology, which will be discussed shortly in this blog. The cave is devoid of any Neanderthal or Homo sapiens bones at any layer that could make the authorship of Gorham’s Etching far more certain. The Neanderthals were first in Europe and at the Gorham’s Cave. There was no apparent sign of Homo sapiens until 20,000 years ago, according to Clive Finlayson and the Gibraltar National Museum team. Thus, a decision of Neanderthal authorship was made by default.
Dissenting Opinions
In an interview with BBC News, website Science editor Paul Rincon covered the story shortly after the Gorham Etching was published in the primary literature. He posted the following dissenting opinion from another perspective.
Sediments covering the engraving have previously yielded stone tools made in the Mousterian style, which is considered diagnostic of Neanderthals. However, other researchers note that such artefacts turn up in North Africa, where there is no trace of habitation by Neanderthals. They have previously reasoned that if Homo sapiens made the Mousterian tools in Africa, they might also be responsible for the ones in Gibraltar. Some 28km of sea separates Gibraltar from the coast of North Africa, and if you look south from the Rock on a clear day, it’s hard to miss Jebel Musa – part of Morocco’s Rif Mountains – rising above the horizon. However, Prof. Finlayson says there is no evidence that modern humans made the crossing until much later. In addition, he points out, Mousterian tools are associated with Neanderthal skeletal remains at the Devil’s Tower site in Gibraltar. (Rincon, P. 2014)
Paul Rincon questions the authorship of Gorham Etching. At least two other bodies of research lead in a different direction than Clive Finlayson has proposed in his study. One is led by Tom Higham, an archeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, whose team used 196 radiocarbon dates of organic remains to show that Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago, but still long after humans arrived on the continent. Modern humans, Tom Higham’s team argued at the time, were in Italy as early as 45,000 years ago (Higham, T. 2014). His analysis of the data doesn’t support the argument that Neanderthals endured by themselves at all locations across Eurasia until as recently as 40,000 years ago.
Shifting Hypotheses
Following the controversy over the sediment layers, Clive Finlayson took another strategy to promote the engraving as of Neanderthal authorship. His Gibraltar National Museum team found a Mousterian artifact above Gorham’s Etching which Clive Finlayson established could only be associated with Neanderthals. This became his conclusive evidence of Neanderthal authorship for Gorham’s Etching, although not acknowledging that someone at any time over tens of thousands of years could have placed the artifact in that position. The new problem he created is that now it also included Homo sapiens whose established sedimentary layers based on established artifacts below the Mousterian artifact and Gorham’s Etching.
A paper titled “A rock engraving made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar,” describing the study of the Gorham Etching, was published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). When asked “Can we compare to art, to geometry?” in a 2014 GBC interview titled ”Groundbreaking Discovery at Gorham’s Cave: Neanderthal Engravings Found,” since uploaded to YouTube as pictured above, Clive Finlayson replied, “This is where we leave it open for others to decide. Tis down to interpretation. And we deliberately didn’t want to go down that far.” The images circulated by the Gibraltar National Museum to the media, as also shown in the background of this pictured GBC video, were the dirt-covered version of the cleaner one that was originally published in the primary literature study.
More of the Same from Team Neanderthal?
In an apparent move to one up the Gorham’s Cave image, a team led by French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet, described finger tracings or “flutings” on the cave walls at the French Cave of La Roche-Cotard as “Unambiguous” art of Neanderthals in their 2023 peer reviewed PLOS One paper (Marquet, Jean-Claude. 2023). Jean-Claude Marquet’s team made no figurative identifications of the finger tracings. Their justification for Neanderthal authorship was a natural closure to the cave they estimated to be between 57,000 to 75,000 years ago which they believe locked out any Homo sapiens access to the panels.
The below video “Neanderthal Art? A closer look at La Roche-Cotard” (PDF) demonstrates that the art in the named French cave is clearly “Unambiguous” but also figurative, featuring bears, hyenas, mammoths, an antelope, a fox, a feline and an unidentified small animal this blogger has since learned is a type of weasel called a “stoat” (Mustela erminea). The La Roche-Cotard panels are stylistically and subjectively consistent with other French Upper Paleolithic cave art. The La Roche-Cotard art was not made by Neanderthals.
The proposed “Neanderthal art” at La Roche-Cotard wasn’t included in Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals either. Kudos to the team for doing their homework.
Homo sapiens presence in Europe has been redated to 54,000 years ago by French archeologist Ludovic Slimak, based on the dating of artifacts in another French cave. Ludovic Slimak, who authored the 2024 book The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature, dismisses the notion that Neanderthals made figurative art. Slimak asks, “Where are the ivory statuettes? Where are the shale platelets decorated with symbols? Where are the bones decorated with friezes of horses or bison. Such objects were produced in almost industrial quantities in the Paleolithic sapiens societies which were supplanting the Neanderthals at that time and in that same place.” Slimak goes on to present how Neanderthals were “remarkable craftsmen,” had the ability to create figurative art but for some reason they didn’t. The better question may be why did we? The archaeologist points to Siberia as the last domain of Neanderthals.
UNESCO World Heritage Certification
Preservation of the Neanderthal hypothesis at Gorham’s Cave was apparently important for global reasons. The Gibraltar National Museum had earlier submitted a bid for the Gorham’s Cave Complex to be designated as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, which it was recognized as in August 2016. The UNESCO page on the tentative list stated that “the greater part of the sequence, from 55,000 to 28,000 years ago, represents occupation by Neanderthals. This cave is the last known site of Neanderthal occupation in the world. Modern Humans entered it around 20,000 years ago” (UNESCO 2015). The first abstract art by Neanderthals elevated the uniqueness of their bid and the justification of UNESCO’s criteria for universal value.
Note the wording on the UNESCO web page has since changed to “Gorham’s Cave Complex provides an exceptional testimony to the occupation, cultural traditions and material culture of Neanderthal and early modern human populations through a period spanning approximately 120,000 years. This is expressed by the rich archaeological evidence in the caves, the rare rock engravings at Gorham’s Caves (dated to more than 39,000 years ago), rare evidence of Neanderthal exploitation of birds and marine animals for food, and the ability of the deposits to depict the climatic and environmental conditions of the peninsula over this vast span of time” (UNESCO). The UNESCO webpage doesn’t clarify who did what and when. Dates matter in archaeology.
The distinguished UNESCO World Heritage Site status puts the Gorham’s Cave Complex in league with The Great Wall of China, the Acropolis in Athens and Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, among other well-known archeological sites. There is no debate as to what peoples built these monuments. Therefore, it is now with the Neanderthal at the Gorham’s Cave in the eyes of the unwitting public.
This UNESCO decision bears much weight, as UNESCO is the “intellectual” agency of the United Nations. The organization is an international golden stamp of approval. The status trumps any peer-reviewed journal challenge to the Neanderthal claims.
Winning Move?
To Team Neanderthal, the crosshatched pattern at the Gorham’s Cave still appeared to be a winning move in this then archeology game of the century. A Neanderthal had not only been there, but the being had created the first known abstract art. Homo sapiens might have even learned from Neanderthals. This is a daunting idea in the chronology of humanity. If correct, it would call for a revision of the prehistory books. Team Neanderthal cited the Gorham’s Cave study to support other work and the momentum shifted in their favor.
In addition to the prized UNESCO status, the Gorham Cave team could become among the distinguished researchers in our time of science and discovery. A great deal was on the line. Paul Rincon’s balanced coverage, offering a cross Strait of Gibraltar option, led his readers to the conclusion that he was unconvinced of Neanderthal authorship and not ready to call checkmate. The missing move to push the momentum back in the other direction was if any Homo sapiens had swam across the strait and left their mark on the Gorham Etching. This blogger has covered the issue at many conferences, such as the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists (PDF) and American Association of Geographers (PDF) videos below. This across the Strait of Gibraltar evidence was given in many other conferences and media going back to 2017. Homo sapiens did swim back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar deep in the Upper Paleolithic. They met Neanderthals at Gorham’s Cave before their ultimate demise as a unique people.
Who was Man-X?
Neanderthal authorship of Gorham’s Etching cannot be dismissed in the absence of Clive Finlayson and the Gibraltar National Museum team “deliberately” choosing to not to finish their homework. We need to explore other clues to establish a more certain identity of the artist.
One approach is to ask the question of “who was Man-X?”, as depicted to the viewer’s left on the Gorham’s Etching image inset above. Was he Homo sapiens, Neanderthal, a mix of the two, or something else entirely? The answer to which and the obvious Homo sapiens character to the viewer’s right could definitively establish authorship of the Gorham Etching. This question is not posed in Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals as Clive Finlayson and the Gibraltar National Museum team doesn’t appear to have been interesting in recognizing any interpretations beyond “abstract art of Neanderthals.”
Clive Finlayson and the archeologists on the Gibraltar National Museum project had a micro view focus on the engraved lines to determine if man or nature created them. However, if we move our heads back a foot, but not more, from the image, we might find another perspective and clues to the identity of the artist. A section to the viewer’s right of “L5” on the Gorham research team’s grayscale image in the figure above appears as if in gold, about the size of a human thumbnail. This lower layer is actually white with a light brown intermediate layer and an upper black layer. The Gibraltar Museum team proposed layer 1 as a white alterite that formed because of ancient weathering of the lime-dolostone substrate (Rodriguez-Vidal, J. 2014).
In this section, there is what appears to be two joined heads—a Janus character—that gaze in opposite directions, as pictured in the above figure. The face to the viewer’s left has a large forehead, angled cheekbones, eyes that are set back, and a huge nose, and what this blogger refers to as “Man-X.” His opposite has a Nordic look about him with smaller nose, eye sockets, forehead and jaw, which is typical of Homo sapiens. The Nordic-looking man has a full-length beard etched from a remnant darker section of the rock that hangs from his mouth. The clumps of hair in the beard have an unkempt flowing look about them. He is bald on top. Whether or not he is naturally bald on top or has shaved his scalp is unclear.
These Gorham’s Etching characters are compared with the actual skulls of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The defining features of Neanderthals are a lower forehead, and large eye sockets, nose, cheekbones and jaw. We may be able to determine what Man-X is by excluding what he is not and what Neanderthal are expected to look like based on fossil finds. Note that the actual Neanderthal skull is propped up to look straight in the eye of the Homo sapiens skull. This blogger believes that we (modern society) tend to visualize Neanderthals with this upright head in our imagery in both books of science and the creations of Hollywood, including Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals. Perhaps, we are attempting to “humanize” the way that we think Neanderthals appeared.
In terms of who Man-X is, a few of the most promising options are: (1) a great ape or monkey; (2) Homo sapiens; (3) a bear; (4) a canid; (5) a mythical creature; (6) a yet to be discovered animal being; (7) a Neanderthal or, (8) a Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrid. Options (1) to (4) are not good visual fits. We would expect more hair for any of the animal beings or a human/animal being mix. The artist was capable of etching hair, as he did so with the beard of the Nordic-looking man. The head of the etching does not match structurally with any of options (1) through (6), especially a Homo sapiens. The Paleolithic artist fits the rear of Man-X’s skull into the head of the Nordic-looking man. He recognized that the skull was not of a bear or canid. A mythical creature is always possible. A yet-to-be-discovered large animal being is highly unlikely given the amount of earth screened in this and surrounding caves and Europe in general.
Neanderthal Transition
A rapidly diminishing number of archeologists propose that Neanderthals died out across Eurasia as late as 39,000 to 41,000 years ago, coinciding with the start of a very cold period in Europe. Most archeologists now agree that Homo sapiens were in Eurasia much earlier although the period of overlap being either a few thousands or ten plus thousands of years is disputed.
This presents the possibility that the Homo sapiens artist didn’t see a Neanderthal, or a Homo sapiens-Neanderthal hybrid, and etched the image based on the skulls he found nearby. The head of the etched Man-X appears in same position as a skull would look if set on a table. Did he see an actual Neanderthal walking or the skull of one on a flat surface? Man-X is detailed with large eyes and nose and is complete with an outstretched tongue. The artist more likely etched what he saw in front of him and the character he depicted in the scene was most likely alive. The Neanderthal/Homo sapiens hybrid option is a stronger possibility, but it would be difficult to determine how much of each contributed.
The man opposite Man-X can be described as “European-looking,” perhaps even Nordic. In this image, he appears to be of a pale skin tone. One would expect a darker complexion through natural exposure to the elements alone. His depicted skin tone and that of Man-X are likely symbolic of something else or just characteristic of the base material. Any analysis of this image should look at the structure of the skull and the size and position of his jaw, nose and mouth, and not skin tone shown in the rock.
In scientific circles, and colloquially today, this Nordic-looking man might have been referred to as “Cro-Magnon.” The current scientific literature prefers the term European early modern humans (EEMH), to the term “Cro-Magnon,” which has no formal taxonomic status, as it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archeological phase or culture. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnons radiocarbon dates up to 44,000 years before the present, and these remains were discovered in Kent’s Cavern in the United Kingdom (Higham, T. 2011). His European and southwest Asian culture from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago was the Aurignacian.
The Nordic-looking man is Homo sapiens and we can conclude that he was in this corner of Europe when Gorham’s Etching was made. His effigy may be check on our archeological chessboard in the game between Team Neanderthal and the Homo sapiens advocates at the Gorham’s Cave regardless of the UNESCO decision, the peer reviewed journal finding and Netflix Secrets of Neanderthals.
There are many examples of animal beings depicted in Paleolithic European caves during the epoch of Gorham’s Etching. There are no other known images of a being that resembles Man-X. A potential image of a Homo sapiens, Neanderthal or hybrid of the two in the Gorham’s Etching is of much greater scientific value than the more dubious first known abstract art of Neanderthals. The two faces that we now see while peering at this effigy may be the most significant faces in the history of humankind.
Jebel Irhoud Changed Everything
This blogger will continue to refer to the etched Homo sapiens in the Gorham’s Etching as the “Nordic-looking man” for consistency. Where he originally gained this Northern European appearance is a question that cannot be answered on this blog. Nevertheless, we may be able to find roots to the Nordic looking man’s appearance by looking back and forth in time on our ancestral journey.
One path to find an earlier origin of this man, or at least the trail traveled by the people with this facial structure, may be taken by examining a similarly looking skull to the etched Nordic-looking man, which has been found at Jebel Irhoud in western Morocco with a lineage dating to at least 160,000 years ago. The facial similarities are such that we could just as easily call the Nordic-looking man in the Gorham Etching the “Moroccan-looking man.” The Jebel Irhoud skull was originally considered to be a North African Neanderthal, but was reclassified to be linked with early anatomically modern Homo sapiens from the Qafzeh and Es Skhul Caves in Israel that date between 80,000 – 120,000 years ago (Smith, T.M. 2007).
A more recent published find of remains from the cave at Jebel Irhoud redating Homo sapiens at more than 300,000 years ago (Hublin, J.J. 2017). The fossils include a partial skull and a lower jaw belonging to three young adults, an adolescent and an eight-year-old child. Before this discovery, the scientific community believed that early modern humans evolved from southeastern Africa 200,000 years ago. What is most significant about these Jebel Irhoud remains is that if we could see these Homo sapiens from 300,000 years ago walking around today with a hat on they would look similar to us. Their faces would be short, flat and retracted compared to Neanderthals, and have dental aspects similar to ours. The only clear visual difference is their elongated skull that is unlike ours. Their brains, and specifically the cerebellum, were not shaped like ours, suggesting that their brains were organized differently (Strickland, A. 2017). They may have thought and felt differently than we do today.
The Gorham’s Cave Janus figure makes the Jebel Irhoud finds more intriguing as the overlapping of the Man-X and Nordic-looking man skulls gives us the elongated skull of the Jebel Irhoud fossil. The mixing of Man-X, possibly with a Neanderthal, may not be found in a progression of Homo sapiens remains but the blend of the two may still be how the Gorham Etching artist reasoned where he came from.
Connecting the Dots
A culture referred to as the “Aterian” inhabited the Jebel Irhoud site deep in prehistory. We might then also be able to refer to the Nordic-looking man as the “Aterian-looking man” if the back of their skulls are the same. The Aterian represents “a new formidable mechanical force let loose in the African world.” It had a wide distribution throughout Africa, including the Western Desert of Egypt but there is no sign of it in the Nile Valley or further east (Willoughby, P. 2007). The Aterian presumably disappeared from North Africa about 40,000 years ago (Garcea, E. 2004).
The Aterian had similar Mousterian style tools that have been linked to the Neanderthals at the Gorham’s Cave. Yet, Neanderthals are not known to have traveled to the interior of Africa and Neanderthal DNA is absent in sub-Saharan African populations. Clive Finlayson’s could have only been Neanderthals approach based on the Mousterian tools has no scientific basis.
Researchers have considered the apparent Mousterian tools of the Aterian connection with those across the Strait of Gibraltar, but had not found another connection that might help develop a stronger hypothesis. Still, two apparently separated cultures, less than 28 kilometers away, created similar tools. The most likely scenario is that people swam back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar. This Strait of Gibraltar crossing became more evident when one of the South African Rising Star Cave engravings was found as being a close match to the Gorham’s Etching, presented the earlier blogs Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part I: The Underworld and Rising Star Cave Engravings – Part II: The Terrestrial Plane. Gibraltar wasn’t the last corner in Europe for Homo sapiens to populate or the final stronghold of Neanderthals on the continent. Gibraltar may have been one of the earliest access points to Europe across the Strait of Gibraltar and the first rock Neanderthals lost their territorial claim.
Homo Sapiens Were Here
There are additional images on Gorham’s Etching that reinforce the identity of the artist as Homo sapiens. Above we find pictured an apparent teacher with a bird mask, likely a kite (Milvus migrans) with his mouth open below the mask. The teacher appears to be communicating with a younger individual, perhaps an apprentice. What may be most significant in this image is that the teacher character has taken on the bird mask to spiritually gain strength from this other animal being. We find many examples of bird masked characters in the Upper Paleolithic, through the Neolithic, among hunter-gatherer peoples worldwide, and into the ancient Mediterranean world. The Gorham’s Etching birdman teacher was not a beginning but rather a tradition that had already migrated worldwide.
Another teacher and apprentice relationship can be found on the Gallery of Discs in northern Iberia. We again see a spiritual relationship between a bird and a human as the pictured teacher has a fledging golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) on his left shoulder. Both the teacher and apprentice have the facial structures and skull geometry of present-day European Homo sapiens, who also have the general appearance of the Nordic-looking man as well as the teacher and apprentice on Gorham’s Etching. None of these characters are Neanderthals.
These examples from the Gallery of Discs and Gorham Etching can be compared with what Paleolithic Homo sapiens looked like 26,000 years ago through the 8 cm (~3 inches) ivory carving of a man and that of a not very dissimilar carving of a woman found in the same Czechoslovakian location. The image of the man as made public by the American paleoanthropologist Alexander Marshack, graced the October 1988 cover of National Geographic and until the time of the work before this reader were the oldest known effigies of Homo sapiens (Marshack, A. 1988).
Alexander Marshack wrote in the National Geographic article that the ivory-carved man featured “staring eyes, pinpoint holes in the irises, heavy brows, a strong upturned nose, a beard, and long deeply incised hair.” If either the man or women in ivory had more modern haircuts and clothing they could pass on the streets in any international city without a second thought as to their origin, although neither would pass as a sibling of the Nordic-looking man or the Gallery of Discs characters.
We also have etchings (49 heads and 18 whole bodies) of Homo sapiens from about 15,000 years ago at the La Marche Cave in Western France (Guthrie, R.D. 2005). These La Marche Cave images have a similar European facial appearance to the Nordic-looking man in the Gorham Etching and those human characters in the Gallery of Discs. They are all the distant ancestors of European people today.
Homo sapiens were in Gibraltar more than 40,000 years ago and continued through the time of the Gorham Etching. We are what hit the Neanderthals. The Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals team filmed at Gorham’s Cave and interviewed Clive Finlayson onsite. They didn’t include his proposed Neanderthal “hashtag” in the documentary. This is telling of the shift away from unsubstantiated archaeology calling out Neanderthal art for what it is.
Mediating the Real and Imaginary
The art in Gorham’s Cave was an early stage in the representation of the avianoid, which is more commonly today called an “angel.” What is most interesting about the Gorham’s Etching avanoid is that we can see the face of the human under the bird mask, indicating that the bird is intended to mediate the real and imaginary. The same human under the mask can also be viewed on the Gallery of Discs at the El Castillo Cave and in the so-called “Shaft of the Dead Man” at Lascaux.
The Faces of Janus
We return now to where we began with the Gorham Etching on the far south of the Iberian Peninsula where a Homo sapiens artist and his apprentice stood at the entrance to the Gorham’s Cave overlooking a great sea from a domain that was at one time exclusive to the Neanderthal. Beyond their visual sight was the African savanna that was only a short swim across the Strait and a walk away. Yet, with a mental transition which is much harder for some to grasp. The artist and apprentice still leave us looking through their shared vision of the people and, African savanna and European animal beings as they saw them. They also leave us the Janus figure with the joined heads of a bearded Homo sapien and Man-X.
Had the ancient Phoenicians carried Romans, who we credit for Janus, on their pilgrimage to the Gorham’s Cave, the passengers might have only recognized one face in this effigy but understood the significance of the two-faced Janus—the Janus figure who was to them the god of beginnings and transitions, passages and endings, and the rising and setting of the sun. He was usually depicted as having two heads, one looking to the future and the other to the past. The Janus figure in the Gorham Etching may represent the transition from a world of Neanderthals to one of Homo sapiens; if this was intentional by the artist, we will never know. What we can see through our own chronology of history is that the Gorham Janus figure is a vision of the artist’s past, present, and future. In the image of these two joined men, perhaps there is another character that overlaps between them—a character that had mixed with Neanderthals to become modern humans.
Can We Really See Gorham’s Etching?
There are four gateways to view Gorham’s Etching in person. Membership on Team Neanderthal isn’t one of them. The first is to win a lottery held by the Gibraltar Government. That’s an impossibility unless you live in Gibraltar – population ~32,000 and still a long shot for residents. Clive Finlayson, who solely holds the keys to Gorham’s Cave, appears to be letting in his close friends. That’s gateway two. An equally unequitable pathway is to book the Gorham’s Cave shore excursion on a luxury Mediterranean cruise. Your cruise bill will be in the many thousands before handing over more cash to the Finlayson family who oversee the Gorham’s Cave operation. This cruise route isn’t a guarantee to see Gorham’s Etching. Most cruisers don’t step beyond the entrance to Gorham’s Cave. The final gateway is to be a card-carrying member of major media who have special access in exchange for promoting Clive Finlayson’s narrative. Are any of these pathways worth the effort or price? The answer is categorially “no” as you will only be looking at the dirt covered Gorham’s Etching. A better approach is to download the cleaned off image from this blog and have the file printed poster size at your local Office Depot. Cost? Less than USD 20.00.
Is the Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals absence of Gorham’s Etching the death of Neanderthal art? Was this checkmate against Team Neanderthal? Or, will a new match leaning on the 40,000-year debunked could only be Neanderthal line start someplace else? Kudos to the Netflix Secrets of the Neanderthals team for getting the Gorham’s Cave narrative mostly correct!
Bernie Taylor is the author of Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017). He regularly presents his work at scientific conferences and is interviewed on podcast channels.
Explore more examinations of Ice Age cave art and other provocative posts from Bernie’s Blog.
References
Callaway, Ewan, 2014. Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15805.
Garcea, Elena. A. A. 2004. Crossing Deserts and Avoiding Seas: Aterian North African-European Relations. Journal of Anthropological Research. 60, No. 1. Spring, 27-53.
Guthrie, R. Dale. 2005. The Nature of Paleolithic Art. University of Chicago Press.
Higham, T.; Compton, T.; Stringer, C.; Jacobi, R.; Shapiro, B.; Trinkaus, E.; Chandler, B.; Gröning, F.; Collins, C.; Hillson, S.; O’Higgins, P.; Fitzgerald, C.; Fagan, M. 2011. The Earliest Evidence for Anatomically Modern Humans in Northwestern Europe. Nature. 479 (7374): 521.
Hublin, J.J. et. al. 2017. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and pan-Africa origin of Homo sapiens. Nature. 546.
Marquet, Jean-Claude. et. al. 2023. The earliest unambiguous Neanderthal engravings on cave walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286568
Marshack, Alexander, 1988. An Ice Age Ancestor? National Geographic. October.
McCann, Brian, 2012. Annual Dig at Gibraltar’s Gorham Cave. Archaeology News Network. August 17.
Rincon Paul, 2014. Neanderthal ‘artwork’ found in Gibraltar cave.BBC News website. 1 September. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28967746.
Rodriguez-Vidal; d’Errico, F.; Giles Pacheco, F.; Blasco, R.; Rosell, J.; Jennings, R.P.; Queffelec, A.; Finlayson, G.; Fa, D.A.; Gutierrez Lopez, J.M.; Carrion, J. S.; Negro, J.J.; Finlayson, S.; Caceres, L.M.; Bernal, M.A.; Fernandez Jimenez, S.; Finlayson, C. (2014). “A rock engraving made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (37): 13301–06.
Slimak, Ludovic. et. al. 2022. Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France. Science Advances. Vol 8, Issue 6.
Slimak, Ludovic. 2024. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature. Pegasus.
Smith, T.M., Tafforeau, P.T., Reid, D.J., Grün, R., Eggins, S., Boutakiout, M. & Hublin, J.-J. 2007. Earliest evidence of modern human life history in North African early Homo sapiens. PNAS. 104:15. 6128-6133.
Strickland, Ashley, 2017. Oldest Homo sapiens fossils discovered. CNN. June 7.
Taylor, Bernie. 2017. Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero. Aquila Media Group.
UNESCO, 2015. Gorham’s Cave Complex.
Willoughby, P.R. 2007. The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa. A Comprehensive Guide. Altamira Press, UK.
