Using birds as indicators of Neanderthal environmental quality: Gibraltar and Zafarraya compared Clive Finlayson a, b , Stewart Finlayson a, c, * , Francisco Giles Guzman d , Antonio S  anchez Marco e , Geraldine Finlayson a, b , Richard Jennings f , Francisco Giles Pacheco g , Joaquin Rodriguez Vidal h a Department of Natural History, The Gibraltar Museum, 18-20 Bomb House Lane, Gibraltar b Institute of Life and Earth Sciences, The University of Gibraltar, Gibraltar Museum Associate Campus, 18-20 Bomb House Lane, Gibraltar c Department of Life Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB1 1PT, United Kingdom d Palaeolithic Archaeology Unit, The Gibraltar Museum, 18-20 Bomb House Lane, Gibraltar e Area of Neogene and Quaternary Faunas, Institut Catal a de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Sabadell, Barcelona, Spain f School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Hayes House, 75 George Street, Oxford, OX1 2BQ, United Kingdom g Gibraltar Caves Project, The Gibraltar Museum, 18-20 Bomb House Lane, Gibraltar h Departamento de Geodin amica y Paleontología, Facultad de Ciencias Experimentales, Campus del Carmen, Universidad de Huelva, 21071 Huelva, Spain article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Neanderthals Gibraltar Zafarraya Fossil bird assemblages Biogeography abstract We compare the Middle Palaeolithic sites of Gibraltar and Zafarraya in southern Iberia. We use birds as indicators of environmental quality and demonstrate huge differences between coastal and inland, mountain, sites separated by less than 150 km. We conclude that the Gibraltar sites represented lo- cations of repeated occupation by Neanderthals over tens of millennia whereas Zafarraya represents a site of sporadic visits for particular prey. This is in response to very different climatic conditions. Our results show how important ecological quality is in understanding Palaeolithic sites and meta- populations and how birds are particularly informative in our understanding of the ecology of such sites. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. 1. Introduction An ecological perspective is central to our understanding of hu- man dispersion, dispersal and extinction in the Pleistocene (Finlayson, 2004). A case in point is the climatically unstable and fluctuating world of the Late Pleistocene, particularly between 50 and 30 thousand years ago (ka), of Eurasia (Finlayson and Carri on, 2007). In Eurasia, this period corresponds to the extinction of the Neanderthals, the arrival of modern humans and the interbreeding of both populations (Callaway, 2015). The distribution of human populations during this period probably took the form of a mosaic across a range of scales in space and time, defying interpretation by tried-and-tested methods available to archaeologists and palae- oanthropologists. The discovery of a new lineage of hominin, based on genetic analysis of an otherwise insignificant finger bone (Krause et al., 2010), is a case in point. Problems of interpretation of spatio- temporal data are heightened in regions of high topographic di- versity at small scales (Finlayson et al., 2004). One such region is the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Birds are excellent indicators of ecological conditions, including habitat structure, bioclimate and environmental quality (Finlayson, 2011). In addition, virtually all Pleistocene species are still present today so that their ecological characteristics are well known. For these reasons birds are ideal subjects for studying the ecological characteristics of Pleistocene sites which they occupied (Finlayson, 2006). The two best studied southern Iberian localities in which the Pleistocene bird species have been studied are Gibraltar and Zafarraya. This paper compares, using the recorded Middle Palaeolithic avifauna, the ecological quality of the two sites and argues that we can only begin to understand complex metapopulation processes (Hanski and Gaggiotti, 2004), once a thorough understanding of the local and regional ecology has been reached. Although it will be difficult to answer metapopulation questions from archaeological and palaeontological sites, a better understanding of the ecological characteristics of such sites can be achieved with birds being ideal candidates for use as indicators * Corresponding author. Department of Natural History, The Gibraltar Museum, 18-20 Bomb House Lane, Gibraltar. E-mail address: stewart.finlayson@gibmuseum.gi (S. Finlayson). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.11.031 1040-6182/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. Quaternary International xxx (2015) 1e14 Please cite this article in press as: Finlayson, C., et al., Using birds as indicators of Neanderthal environmental quality: Gibraltar and Zafarraya compared, Quaternary International (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.11.031