Bajondillo Cave

Underneath the apartment blocks of Torremolinos is a cave that moved the date modern humans reached Western Europe back by five thousand years — and then triggered a public argument in a scientific journal about whether the dating holds up at all. Both halves of that story matter, and only the first one usually gets told.

Why this cave survived and others did not

Bajondillo sits in a rocky promontory about two hundred metres from the Mediterranean. That elevation is the whole reason it is useful: rising sea levels drowned most coastal caves along this shore, taking their deposits with them, and Bajondillo escaped. What it preserved is an unusually long, layered record — roughly 160,000 to 35,000 years ago — covering both Neanderthal occupation in the Middle Palaeolithic and modern human occupation in the Upper. The excavation produced a 544-page monograph in 2007 and has been worked on by teams from Seville, Córdoba, Granada and Málaga.

The 2018 result, and the pushback

In 2018 an international team including Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum published new dating in Nature Ecology & Evolution. It placed the changeover from Mousterian tools, associated with Neanderthals, to Aurignacian tools, associated with modern humans, between roughly 45,000 and 43,000 years ago. That is about five thousand years earlier than the accepted figure for southern Iberia, and it detached the arrival of modern humans from the extreme cold of Heinrich event 4, which came later at around 39,500 years ago. Because the cave sits on the coast, the authors argued it strengthened the case for Mediterranean coastal routes into Europe, and revived the Strait of Gibraltar as a plausible crossing. The result did not go unchallenged: the same journal published two critical responses — one arguing that dating alone cannot resolve occupation patterns, another that the evidence for a very early Aurignacian in southern Iberia is not reliable — along with the authors’ reply. That exchange is still the honest state of play.

Neanderthals eating shellfish

The other significant finding gets less attention and is arguably more human. The Middle Palaeolithic levels contain thousands of fragments of seashell, the oldest dated to around 150,000 years ago. That places Neanderthals systematically gathering and eating marine resources on this coast at roughly the same period that early Homo sapiens were doing the same thing at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. The researchers describe it as a possible case of behavioural convergence: two separate populations arriving independently at the same solution.

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