Last Neanderthals in the warmest refugium of Europe: Palynological data from Vanguard Cave

This paper deals with pollen analyses performed on hyaena coprolites from Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, with the aim at depicting the vegetation landscapes of the southern Iberia Neanderthals during the MIS 3. The Palaeolithic vegetation in the surroundings would include pine, oak, juniper, Pistacia, and mixed woodlands, savannahs, riverine forest patches, heliophytic matorrals, rocky scrub with chamaephytes and hemicryptophytes, grasslands with heaths, shrubby grasslands, and steppe-like saltmarshes and littoral vegetation. A comparison with a former palaeobotanical study in the adjacent Gorham´s Cave providing data for the MIS 3 and MIS 2, is carried out. Placing the palaeobotanical records of Vanguard and Gorham´s Caves in an European context, the southern coasts of Iberia emerge as the most thermic phytoreservoir of the Late Quaternary, which have important implications for existing arguments about the long survival of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula.