Biodiversity and late Neanderthal survival

There's an interesting tidbit in today's Science Daily about how a refugium area around Gibraltar may have helped Neanderthal foragers survive there up to ten millennia later than elsewhere in Europe.

"... when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet."

You can access the report here. Interesting how resource abundance is tied to the stability of a forager system so far back in the past.

Scales of observation in forager studies

From R. Layton's Time and Change: Crisp Snapshots and Fuzzy Trends:

"... while anthropological field studies provide an adequate time scale to explain the mechanisms and proximate causes of human-animal interactions in particular circumstances, archaeological or evolutionary time scales are necessary to explain the long-term processes that brought those conditions about. The emergent properties of an ecological system are generated by the long-term interaction of species. The consequences of such interaction may well not be apparent within the time-span of participant observation, nor could they be understood by simply adding up a series of ethnographic 'snapshots.'" (Layton 2008: 8)

Reference:

Layton, R. 2008. Time and change: Crisp snapshots and fuzzy trends. In Time and Change: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on the Long-Term in Hunter-Gatherer Societies (ed. by D. Papagianni, R. Layton, and H. Maschner), pp. 1-13. Oxbow Books, Oxford.