Gibraltar data are too sparse to inform on Neanderthal exploitation of coastal resources

Stringer et al. (1) report 149 mollusk shells, 5 seal bones, 3 dolphin bones, and 3 fish bones from Mousterian layers in 2 caves on Gibraltar. From this they argue that the Neanderthals had “focused coastal visits… repeated during particular times, possibly seasonal” (p. 14323) and that in this respect they surpassed their South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) contemporaries. However, the Gibraltar samples are far too small to support this or any similar conclusion. To underscore the point, our current excavations at the Ysterfontein 1 MSA Rockshelter have produced >10,000 mollusks and >200 Cape fur seal bones (2). Other MSA assemblages are as large or larger, and comparisons between them and large, succeeding Later Stone Age coastal assemblages show that the MSA samples contain many fewer fish, much larger limpets and other shellfish, and fewer newly weaned fur seals (3–5). The sum could mean that MSA people did not fish routinely (probably because they lacked the relevant technology), that they collected shellfish less intensively (probably because their populations were less dense), and that they visited the coast throughout the year instead of focusing their coastal visits on the season when newly weaned seals were particularly abundant. These interpretations are debatable, but the differences that they reflect would never emerge from samples as tiny as those from Gibraltar. Numbers matter, and the Gibraltar samples are currently too small to compare Neanderthal coastal exploitation with that of other people.