Clive Finlayson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3646178 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clive Finlayson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clive |
| FAMILY NAME | Finlayson |
| SIGNATURE | FINLAYSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4795-9430 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sea, sickness and cautionary tales
During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish ships sailed around the globe connecting Spain to its colonies. While documentary records offer rich details concerning life on board ship, archaeological information is essential to generating a full picture of the past. The cemetery at Old St Bernard's Hospital, Gibraltar, provides an opportunity to study the skeletal remains of sailors. Following previous osteological research, carbon, nitr…
The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years
Genomics of the Iberian Peninsula Ancient DNA studies have begun to help us understand the genetic history and movements of people across the globe. Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, Olalde et al. report genome-wide data from 271 ancient individuals from Iberia (see the Perspective by Vander Linden). The findings provide a comprehensive genetic time transect of the region. Linguistics analysis and genetic analysis of archaeological human remains…
Chronology of the Late Pleistocene archaeological sequence at Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar
Bray, una cueva sepulcral de la Edad del Bronce en el Peñón de Gibraltar
Las excavaciones en la Cueva de Bray en Gibraltar han documentado una serie de enterramientos de la Edad de Bronce, esto supone una nueva aportación al conocimiento de la ocupación prehistórica del Peñón de Gibraltar y se convierte en una referencia regional para el estudio de los rituales funerarios de este período
Death in the sun
In 2014, during construction work at the ex-Civil Hospital in Gibraltar, excavations led by the Gibraltar Museum revealed a major, previously unknown burial ground containing more than 200 skeletons. We present the historical, archaeological and radiometric dating evidence from the site alongside the results of initial osteological analyses. The data indicate that the burials pertain to an earlier 16th-century Spanish hospice, and therefore stand…
Hands in the dark
The work in the inner area of Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, has added to the Palaeolithic art located in the cave. Although work continues on the surveying and the study of the evidence found up to now, we present here a preview consisting of a representation of a red deer, and also a hand stencil, alongside numerous marks which have been found scattered throughout the inner cave. In this paper we present new data on the Upper Palaeolithic rock art i…
The birdmen of the Pleistocene
Using birds as indicators of Neanderthal environmental quality
Potential exploitation of avian resources by fossil hominins
Pigeons and choughs, a usual resource for the Neanderthals in Gibraltar
Myths, Moors and Holy War
WHEN DOCUMENTING GIBRALTAR's medieval history and that of its eponymous Straits, there is a tendency to accept at face value the historical accounts that relate the existential struggle for control of this strategic area between Christianity and Islam through time. For Gibraltar's history this entailed a continuous occupation from at least the 11th or even the 8th century to the present day. Fieldwork at Gibraltar over the last 20 years is transf…
The Water Optimisation Hypothesis and the human occupation of the mid-latitude belt in the Pleistocene
Climatic conditions for the last Neanderthals
Small Game and Marine Resource Exploitation by Neanderthals
Palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic proxies of the Gorham’s cave small mammal sequence, Gibraltar, southern Iberia
The tools of the last Neanderthals
Forever Opportunists
THE spreading out of a Central Asian population into Europe around 30 thousand years ago was only part of a wider picture. There is no reason to suppose that such an expansion followed a single direction. After all this was not a concerted drive or migration, like the raids of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes would be many millennia later, but a demographic collared dove-style expansion. We have seen the driving force behind the expansion and t…
Being in the Right Place at the Right Time
THE arrival of the Ancestors in Australia around 50 thousand years ago was the result of a coincidence of events and of people being in the right place, in this case India, at the right time. When a cooling and drying climate began to desiccate their savannah homeland, a new belt of savannah opened up to the south-east; the same climate change that was turning savannah into arid bad lands in one place was reducing the domain of the rain forest an…
Prologue When Climate Changed the Course of History
CONTRARY to popular belief, history does not repeat itself. The story of our planet was not predetermined, there was no air of inevitability to it, and the story of life does not speak to us of a linear progression from primitive to sophisticate. Instead, its shape has been carved out by the accumulation and loss of information, genetic and cultural, creating the illusion of relentless progress. This history is full of cases in which chance event…
Title Pages
Once We Were Not Alone
IN the previous chapter I suggested that it was strange that small-brained proto-humans had reached all the way down to South Africa from the Ethiopian heartland, but apparently had not made it into the Middle East which was so much closer. Until very recently the prevalent view was that it was Homo erectus who first managed to break out of Africa and disperse across Eurasia. We saw in the Prologue how the strict political division of continents,…
The Road to Extinction Is Paved with Good Intentions
AROUND half a million years ago a clan of people lived in some of the valleys of northern Spain, close to today’s cathedral city of Burgos. To all intents and purposes they were recognizably human. They were intelligent, tall, and well built: they averaged 1.75 metres in stature, weighed around 95 kilos, had brains of comparable size to ours, lived in social groups, and were probably able to speak. More than 5,000 human fossils belonging to at le…
If Only …
WHEN I first got involved with our origins back in 1989, the gospel went something like this: anatomically modern humans, our ancestors, descended from a common ancestor— ‘mitochondrial Eve’—who had lived 200 thousand years ago in tropical Africa. They emerged from this home and conquered the world. It was beyond question that these moderns had replaced each and every other population of human on the planet as they swept across the land. To even …
Stick to What You Know Best
IT is hard to imagine while strenuously walking in the heart of an equatorial rain forest, gasping for every breath in a stifling humid sauna, how people could have ever adapted to life under these conditions. It is not just the oppressive climate—the tall forest itself is dark, little light reaching the floor from the canopy, and you do not see any animals. It is a complete contrast to the herbivore-rich dry savannahs of tropical Africa. Yet the…
The Pawn Turned Player
IN the previous chapter we saw how people sought refuge from the Ice Age in the south of Europe. They were descendants of the Gravettian people that had spread right across the Eurasian steppe– tundra at a time when increasingly cold and dry conditions were opening up many areas formerly taken up by woodland. The genetic mutations that allowed us to trace the spread of these people from Central Asia also show that an offshoot of these people pene…
Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar—The persistence of a Neanderthal population
Pigeons and choughs, a usual resource for the Neanderthals in Gibraltar
Climatic conditions for the last Neanderthals
The Humans Who Went Extinct
Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they were. We think of them as crude and clumsy and not very bright, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart modern humans that came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. But was it really as si…
The tools of the last Neanderthals
Potential exploitation of avian resources by fossil hominins
Using birds as indicators of Neanderthal environmental quality
The Water Optimisation Hypothesis and the human occupation of the mid-latitude belt in the Pleistocene
Hands in the dark
The work in the inner area of Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, has added to the Palaeolithic art located in the cave. Although work continues on the surveying and the study of the evidence found up to now, we present here a preview consisting of a representation of a red deer, and also a hand stencil, alongside numerous marks which have been found scattered throughout the inner cave. In this paper we present new data on the Upper Palaeolithic rock art i…
The birdmen of the Pleistocene
Sea, sickness and cautionary tales
During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish ships sailed around the globe connecting Spain to its colonies. While documentary records offer rich details concerning life on board ship, archaeological information is essential to generating a full picture of the past. The cemetery at Old St Bernard's Hospital, Gibraltar, provides an opportunity to study the skeletal remains of sailors. Following previous osteological research, carbon, nitr…
Myths, Moors and Holy War
WHEN DOCUMENTING GIBRALTAR's medieval history and that of its eponymous Straits, there is a tendency to accept at face value the historical accounts that relate the existential struggle for control of this strategic area between Christianity and Islam through time. For Gibraltar's history this entailed a continuous occupation from at least the 11th or even the 8th century to the present day. Fieldwork at Gibraltar over the last 20 years is transf…
La representación del movimiento y la actitud (antropomorfos y zoomorfos) en los motivos pictóricos de los abrigos rocosos de Sierra Momia (Benalup-Casas Viejas, Cádiz)
En este artículo abordamos un tema que generalmente no se ha tratado de manera específica al observar el arte rupestre postpaleolítico definido como esquemático, a pesar de sus múltiples variantes formales, en la Península Ibérica —la plasmación del movimiento y la actitud en la representación de figuras antropomorfas y zoomorfas—. La originalidad de las manifestaciones artísticas de la Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras y demás abrigos de Sierra Momi…
The survival of the weakest
The thrust of this book is that pressures and stresses on peripheral populations in areas of population growth have driven the changes that have marked human biological and cultural evolution. It has been the stressed populations that have been the most innovative (e.g. Fitzhugh, 2001). Hominids have responded to the increasing instability with risk reduction responses that fit under the umbrella of increasing the spatio-temporal scale of operati…
The Modern Human–Neanderthal problem
Current theories of Modern Human origins are divisible into two groups. There are those that promote regional continuity and hybridisation and those that advocate a recent African origin to all Moderns (Klein, 1999). In the first category is the strict Regional Continuity Model (Wolpoff, 1989) which proposes that ancestral populations of an archaic hominid dispersed from Africa across the Old World around 1.9 Myr and that the populations that set…
The Modern Human colonisation and the Neanderthal extinction
There are repeating patterns that we can observe among a wide range of organisms that occupied Pleistocene Europe. These include the contraction into southern refugia and subsequent expansions during climatic amelioration that I shall describe in this chapter. In seeking a generalised theory that accounts for the varying fortunes of the Neanderthals and Moderns we must consider that Pleistocene people were humans, not super-humans. By this I mean…
The conditions in Africa and Eurasia during the last glacial cycle
The global pattern In this chapter I will focus my attention particularly on temperate and boreal Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa, which are the key areas that will be examined in Chapter I with regard to the Neanderthal extinction and the colonisation by Moderns. In Chapter 3 I described the pattern of increasing global climatic deterioration and instability during the Pleistocene. This progressive deterioration led, for example, to the con…
Biogeographical patterns
The distribution and abundance of plants and animals during the Quaternary is of great interest in the understanding of the pattern for any particular species. In our case it is fundamental to understanding the way in which humans were distributed at different times during the Quaternary. It is important to start our discussion at the macro-ecological scale. The broad biogeographic picture will give us important insights at the scale which is mos…
Human range expansions, contractions and extinctions
African beginnings We saw in the previous chapter how climate-induced habitat and landscape changes acted as catalysts to human range expansions, shifts and contractions. This chapter explores these processes in greater detail. Novelty in the genus Homo was generated repeatedly in eastern Africa. It is not unexpected that the sources of biological novelty should be tropical given the tropical nature of the primates as a whole (Foley, 1987) and th…
Comparative behaviour and ecology of Neanderthals and Modern Humans
An understanding of the ecology of any species must include a knowledge of what it eats, where it finds it (and also water) and how it catches and processes it, where, when and with whom it breeds, where it obtains shelter and how it avoids predation and competition. These are problems common to all animals and need to be examined at different scales in order to fully comprehend them: daily, seasonal and inter-annual cycles may all have a bearing…
Human evolution in the Pleistocene
The origins of humanity may be traced to the tropical African Pliocene, around 6 million years ago (Myr). Genetic evidence has for some time predicted the existence of a common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans around 5–6 Myr (Takahata & Satta, 1997; Gagneux & Varki, 2001). Recent discoveries of African fossils that are claimed to be close to this common ancestor have been dated to between 6 and 7 Myr (Brunet et al ., 2002). From this point unti…
Neanderthals and Modern Humans
Neanderthals and Modern Humans develops the theme of the close relationship between climate change, ecological change and biogeographical patterns in humans during the Pleistocene. In particular, it challenges the view that Modern Human 'superiority' caused the extinction of the Neanderthals between 40 and 30 thousand years ago. Clive Finlayson shows that to understand human evolution, the spread of humankind across the world and the extinction o…
Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar—The persistence of a Neanderthal population
A coastal reservoir of biodiversity for Upper Pleistocene human populations
Forever Opportunists
THE spreading out of a Central Asian population into Europe around 30 thousand years ago was only part of a wider picture. There is no reason to suppose that such an expansion followed a single direction. After all this was not a concerted drive or migration, like the raids of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes would be many millennia later, but a demographic collared dove-style expansion. We have seen the driving force behind the expansion and t…
Being in the Right Place at the Right Time
THE arrival of the Ancestors in Australia around 50 thousand years ago was the result of a coincidence of events and of people being in the right place, in this case India, at the right time. When a cooling and drying climate began to desiccate their savannah homeland, a new belt of savannah opened up to the south-east; the same climate change that was turning savannah into arid bad lands in one place was reducing the domain of the rain forest an…
Prologue When Climate Changed the Course of History
CONTRARY to popular belief, history does not repeat itself. The story of our planet was not predetermined, there was no air of inevitability to it, and the story of life does not speak to us of a linear progression from primitive to sophisticate. Instead, its shape has been carved out by the accumulation and loss of information, genetic and cultural, creating the illusion of relentless progress. This history is full of cases in which chance event…
Title Pages
Once We Were Not Alone
IN the previous chapter I suggested that it was strange that small-brained proto-humans had reached all the way down to South Africa from the Ethiopian heartland, but apparently had not made it into the Middle East which was so much closer. Until very recently the prevalent view was that it was Homo erectus who first managed to break out of Africa and disperse across Eurasia. We saw in the Prologue how the strict political division of continents,…
The Road to Extinction Is Paved with Good Intentions
AROUND half a million years ago a clan of people lived in some of the valleys of northern Spain, close to today’s cathedral city of Burgos. To all intents and purposes they were recognizably human. They were intelligent, tall, and well built: they averaged 1.75 metres in stature, weighed around 95 kilos, had brains of comparable size to ours, lived in social groups, and were probably able to speak. More than 5,000 human fossils belonging to at le…
If Only …
WHEN I first got involved with our origins back in 1989, the gospel went something like this: anatomically modern humans, our ancestors, descended from a common ancestor— ‘mitochondrial Eve’—who had lived 200 thousand years ago in tropical Africa. They emerged from this home and conquered the world. It was beyond question that these moderns had replaced each and every other population of human on the planet as they swept across the land. To even …
Stick to What You Know Best
IT is hard to imagine while strenuously walking in the heart of an equatorial rain forest, gasping for every breath in a stifling humid sauna, how people could have ever adapted to life under these conditions. It is not just the oppressive climate—the tall forest itself is dark, little light reaching the floor from the canopy, and you do not see any animals. It is a complete contrast to the herbivore-rich dry savannahs of tropical Africa. Yet the…
The Pawn Turned Player
IN the previous chapter we saw how people sought refuge from the Ice Age in the south of Europe. They were descendants of the Gravettian people that had spread right across the Eurasian steppe– tundra at a time when increasingly cold and dry conditions were opening up many areas formerly taken up by woodland. The genetic mutations that allowed us to trace the spread of these people from Central Asia also show that an offshoot of these people pene…
Africa in Europe— A Mediterranean Serengeti
Aline of cork oak trees was silhouetted against a pastel sky as the sun rose as a red ball over the low and distant horizon. Patches of orange water glistened against a dark background of sedge and rush. The nocturnal chorus of frogs sang their encore and went to sleep before the first hungry kites took to the wing in search of breakfast. Raucous calls from within the oaks signalled another day in ‘la Pajarera’, as the huge heronry was known in t…
Failed Experiments
IN 1932 human remains were excavated in the cave of es-Skhul (Mount Carmel). The finds were part of a joint expedition by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research. Dorothy Garrod from Cambridge University was the director but she was away from the site when her assistant,>T. D. McCown (from the American School), made the discoveries. Garrod had been the prize pupil of the great French prehisto…
End Notes
Subject Earth Sciences and Geography Environment Science and Mathematics Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
One Small Step for Man . . .
THE kinds of rapid environmental changes that Neanderthals had been experiencing across Eurasia, on either side of the mid-latitude mountainous belt, since at least 50 thousand years ago also affected the newly arrived Ancestors. We saw in Chapter 6 how difficult it was to distinguish the makers of the different technologies springing up here and there across this vast stretch of land; we were unable to confirm the presence of Ancestors anywhere …
Geography (36 works) · Archaeology (32 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (29 works) · Biology (22 works) · History (17 works) · Ecology (14 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (11 works) · Cave (11 works) · Paleontology (11 works) · Paleontology (11 works)