A special place for them? From ScienceDaily:
New research led by the University of Southampton shows Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago.
…
Lead author Dr Andy Shaw of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO) at the University of Southampton said: “La Cotte seems to have been a special place for Neanderthals. They kept making deliberate journeys to reach the site over many, many generations. We can use the stone tools they left behind to map how they were moving through landscapes, which are now beneath the English Channel. 180,000 years ago, as ice caps expanded and temperatures plummeted, they would have been exploiting a huge offshore area, inaccessible to us today.” Paper. (public access) – Andrew Shaw, Martin Bates, Chantal Conneller, Clive Gamble, Marie-Anne Julien, John McNabb, Matt Pope, Beccy Scott. The archaeology of persistent places: the Palaeolithic case of La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey. Antiquity, 2016; 90 (354): 1437 DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.212 More.
They must have had a very durable cultural memory.
See also:Early human religion: A 747 built in the basement with an X-Acto knife
Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents
and
A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?
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