THE last known refuge of the Neanderthals before they were driven to extinction by Modern Man and climate change has been traced to a cave in Gibraltar.

New excavations at Gorham’s Cave, in the British territory, have suggested that Neanderthal Man was still living there thousands of years after the species was thought to have died out.

Stone tools of Neanderthal design unearthed at the site have been dated to just 28,000 years ago, and may have been made as recently as 24,000 years ago, scientists said yesterday. This indicates that the human relatives survived in Europe for much longer than is generally thought: though dating evidence is disputed, most researchers agree that the most recent Neanderthal fossils and artefacts are at least 30,000 years old.

As modern Homo sapiens is known to have been present in southern Spain at least 32,000 years ago, and had reached other parts of Europe 36,000 years ago, the research shows that the two species must have lived alongside one another for several millennia. Previous evidence suggested that the Neanderthals survived only until between 30,000 and 33,000 years ago, allowing for little coexistence.

This could shed important light on the unresolved question of why Homo neanderthalis died out so soon after the arrival of Modern Man in Europe, after thriving in the continent for hundreds of thousands of years. The new research, published in the journal Nature, suggests that no single cause was to blame: rather, the species suffered from a cooling climate, and from competition for increasingly scarce resources with the more intelligent Homo sapiens.

In some parts of Europe, Modern Man probably also came into direct conflict with his Neanderthal cousins, though scientists now think it unlikely that Neanderthals were the victims of a continent-wide genocide. “It looks more and more as if the demise of the Neanderthals was complex,” said Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London, who contri-buted to the new study. “There isn’t a single explanation — different things happened in different regions.

“Population densities of both species were so low that they wouldn’t have encountered each other much. Where they did, there might have been conflict, but in other regions, modern humans may have killed them off without intending to, by pushing them into more marginal areas where life was less good. Then they suffered as the climate cooled.”

Clive Finlayson, of the Gibraltar Museum, who led the research team, said: “As forest turned into tundra, the Neanderthal lifestyle would have become more untenable, while modern humans were better adapted. They would have become confined to smaller and smaller groups, which, as we know from tigers and pandas, are vulnerable to human influence and disease.”

A longer co-existence between the two species also makes it possible that they occasionally interbred, though this must have been infrequent because genetic evidence shows that Modern Man has no Neanderthal DNA. Even so, the latest dates for settlement at Gorham’s Cave overlap with those for the Lagar Velho child, a fossil found in Portugal that has been proposed as a Homo sapiens-Neanderthal hybrid.

As it has been dated to 24,500 years ago, many scientists have cast doubt on this theory as Neanderthals were assumed to have died out by then, but the new evidence makes it possible that it was the offspring of the two human species. Neanderthal settlements have been known in Gibraltar since the 19th century, but the dig at Gorham’s Cave is the first to pin down such a late date for their survival there.

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