Devil's Tower Cave is a cave in the

British Overseas Territory The British Overseas Territories (BOTs) or alternatively referred to as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are the fourteen dependent territory, territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom that, ...

Gibraltar Gibraltar ( , ) is a British Overseas Territories, British Overseas Territory and British overseas cities, city located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, on the Bay of Gibraltar, near the exit of the Mediterranean Sea into the A ...

. Archaeologist

Dorothy Garrod Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA (5 May 1892 – 18 December 1968) was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1 ...

found a

Neanderthal Neanderthals ( ; ''Homo neanderthalensis'' or sometimes ''H. sapiens neanderthalensis'') are an extinction, extinct group of archaic humans who inhabited Europe and Western and Central Asia during the Middle Pleistocene, Middle to Late Plei ...

skull in the cave which, together with other evidence found in this cave, shows it was used as a

rock shelter A rock shelter (also rockhouse, crepuscular cave, bluff shelter, or abri) is a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff. In contrast to solutional caves (karst), which are often many miles long or wide, rock shelters are alm ...

by the

Neanderthals of Gibraltar The Neanderthals in Gibraltar were among the first to be discovered by modern scientists and have been among the most well studied of their species according to a number of extinction studies which emphasize regional differences, usually claiming ...

Geography

Gibraltar is sometimes referred to as the "Hill of Caves" and the geological formation of all the caves is limestone. Devil's Tower Cave is a very narrow fissure which was used by Neanderthals as a rock shelter. It has a maximum height of just over ten metres and is only around a meter wide heading into the cliff face for approximately four meters. The cave floor is nine meters above present sea level on a rocky outcrop. The cave was discovered by Col. William Willoughby Cole Verner, an English ornithologist who had retired in

Algeciras Algeciras () is a city and a municipalities in Spain, municipality of Spain belonging to the province of Cádiz, Andalusia. Located in the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, near the Strait of Gibraltar, it is the largest city on the Bay of G ...

in 1911, and the famous French prehistorian L’Abbe Breuil. Brueil and Verner had worked together before. They realised the importance of the site's breccias but didn't have time to excavate the site.Devil's Tower Cave
. Underground-Gibraltar, accessed 20 January 2013 On 28 April 1917 they returned to the site for a closer inspection and found various Neanderthal stone tools and animal remains. This visit was also cut short as a military police officer saw them clambering up the cliff face and told them they could not do this and had to "keep to the road". On 10 April 1919 they yet again returned to the site, this time with a pass given to them by the then Governor. They eagerly explored the talus and were able to find some more remains including over a dozen flint tools and they described the area as having several beddings of rock falls and breccias. From these discoveries and the fact that Devil's Tower Cave was so close to Forbes' Quarry Cave, where Gibraltar 1, the famous Neanderthal skull, had been found a few years earlier in 1848, they deduced that the cave site had been used by "Prehistoric Man" and that the remains of animal bones and shells were the leftovers of their food. It was clear to them that they had also been cooking these animals, since pieces of burnt bone and charcoal were also found. Between November 1925 and January 1927, the site was further investigated by

from Cambridge University at the suggestion of L’Abbe Breuil. She excavated the site intensively and succeeded in discovering another very important find, a Neanderthal Skull, now referred to as Gibraltar 2. It is now known that this skull belonged to a Neanderthal child of around four years of age. In 2018 the status of the Devil's Tower cave was confirmed in the Government of Gibraltar's Heritage and Antiquities Act. The act noted that it was a

Mousterian The Mousterian (or Mode III) is an Industry (archaeology), archaeological industry of Lithic technology, stone tools, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, and with the earliest anatomically modern humans in North Africa and We ...

shelter and the site of the discovery of a Neanderthal skull..

References

*This article uses freely licensed text generously shared by https://underground-gibraltar.com {{Caves of Gibraltar Caves of Gibraltar Neanderthal sites