ONE DAY THERE MAY BE A FILM OF IT, perhaps starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It is the epic tale of survival against the odds, while surrounded and outnumbered by competitors with superior technology. The title: The Last of the Neanderthals.

Neanderthals were thought to have gone extinct around the time modern humans arrived in Europe, about 32,000 years ago. But now, the discovery of artefacts in a cave in Gibraltar shows that a remnant population clung on until at least 28,000 years ago. Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens coexisted for thousands of years.

Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum, and colleagues, recovered 240 stone tools and artefacts from sediments dated to the Upper Palaeolithic period – between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago. Mass spectrometry dating puts them between 28,000 and 24,000 years old.

The exciting point is that the tools are all of a type known to palaeontologists as Mousterian: they are flints, cherts and quartzites exclusively associated with Neanderthal manufacture.

“Mousterian technology is firmly associated with Neanderthals across Europe,” says Finlayson, who adds that in the sediment layers where the tools where found there is no hint of intrusion from more recent layers, and no sign of tools made by modern humans.

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