BROOKE GLADSTONE Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archeologist, author and honorary fellow in the School of Archeology Classics in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. She's the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and  Art.

At the base of The Rock of Gibraltar, off the south coast of Spain are the great Goram and Vanguard Caves more akin to cathedrals than your average grottoes. Rising sea levels have encroached on the caves, submerging some of the landscape where the Neanderthals once ranged. But Clive Finlayson, director, chief scientist and curator of the Gibraltar National Museum, has committed himself to quote 'underdrowning' of lost world those caves contain. His team has uncovered stone tools, the first Neanderthal etching ever found, and even their footprints. But equally important were the bones not just of Neanderthals, but of birds. 161 species, 33 percent of all birds in Europe at the time. Those bones refuted the notion that Neanderthals were neither clever nor nimble enough to catch fast flying prey. Welcome to the show, Clive.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Hi, it's a pleasure to be with you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You didn't just examine the birds. As a biologist, you examined the behavior of the descendants of those birds. The golden eagle. The snowy owl – vultures also feature in your story.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Yes, indeed. There are four different species of vultures in Europe still today, and we find all four of them in the caves. One of our trips, we went up to the Pyrenees in northern Spain. There's a guy there who spent the last 30 years putting food out for vultures. You start going up a slope and the vultures start flying around you because they've seen him. You have to shoo them with your hands. Wild vultures. And when they come to feed, they feed from your hand. Now, Neanderthals were probably much better naturalists than any of us are today because their lives depended on it. I'm sure they could do very similar things and catch birds in a diversity of ways that we can't imagine. For me, the most exciting one of the four vultures is the one we call the bearded vulture that comes in at the end of the feast and eats bone. It's a bone breaker. But the interesting story with that one is the bearded vulture is the animal that invented cosmetics.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

CLIVE FINLAYSON Oh yes. Hear me out. Bearded vultures. When you look at them, are orange underneath. Some of them are white. Some of them are less white. We know they go to streams rich in iron and they paint themselves orange. There is a lot of data now that shows that the more orange the males and the females look, the more successful they are producing baby bearded vultures. If you go to the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, where there are no iron ponds or streams, the bearded vultures are all white because they can't paint themselves. Now what do humans do? They paint themselves with ochre. They do what bearded vultures do. Where Neanderthals somehow watching these bearded vultures, which were living in the same environments as they were. And did we pick up that particular habit of using ochre as paint from those vultures?

BROOKE GLADSTONE What would you say were the greatest discoveries and the biggest correctives that the caves at Gibraltar revealed to you?

CLIVE FINLAYSON The biggest one was popularly known as the hashtag.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Describe the hashtag.

CLIVE FINLAYSON The hashtag is a series of criss lines dug with stone tools by the Neanderthals onto the side of the cave, onto rock. To find an engraving made by a Neanderthal, the first in the world, was a big claim, so we had to be really, really sure of what we were doing. We got similar rocks and reproduced the engraving. We did one stroke of the groove and another one until we reached the depth of the groove, and one group took 60 strokes and we were not very good at it. We kept breaking the stone tool. We couldn't keep to a straight line.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You're using the equivalent tools that you found in the cave.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Correct. And on the same rock surface type. So we knew already that whoever done this had done it before because it wasn't an easy thing to do to keep 60 strokes, the straight line rock and rock. Not that easy, anyway. So we calculated the whole thing, and we reckon the whole design took two hours to do so. This wasn't a doodle. This wasn't casual. So the next question was, OK, maybe that just marks left as they're butchering the meat. Right next experiment, we sent somebody to the butchers and we got cuts of meat. We put them on the rock surface. First thing you realize you can't keep a straight line. It wasn't Butchery marks. So is it art? Well, I've seen worse things today called that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Or it could have another meaning it could. It could be a calculation of some sort.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Exactly. So the significance of this was that it showed that somebody, a Neanderthal, was abstracting something from their world and trying to represent it on those rocks, whether it was art, whether it was a map, whether it was a Klan symbol. We can speculate at length and it's fun to do that. But the point was it was revealing these higher cognitive abilities that had previously only been attributed to modern humans.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Could you take me into the cave preserved under a layer of sand? You found a moment in time. An abandoned dinner.

CLIVE FINLAYSON One archeological level in the cave, which goes back to about 45,000 years. There, the Neanderthals had come in. They'd made a campfire that butchered a wild goat, an ibex, and they ate it and they walked away. The fire was put out and the remains of the butchered animal were left there. We found all that and even the embers of the charcoal as it was spitting from the fire. It's all there. But then interestingly, just above. If it's above, it happened just after the Neanderthals left, we found a lot of hyena poop. We'll call them coprolites. What happened, obviously, was the hyenas came in to scavenge the remains of the Neanderthal barbecue.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mm-Hmm.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Well, the hyenas eat a lot of bone. So the coprolites are quite solid and hard and preserved. Now, why should that be interesting? Because if you take that to the lab and you dissect it, look it under hyper microscope. We find residues of pollen. Now, how does pollen get into hyena poop when hyenas are carnivore? Well, when ingesting the intestines of the herbivores, they're ingesting the meal of the herbivore and the pollen. So this is really like ultra forensic research, but we can then look at the pollen that was in the hyena poop from 45,000 years ago. We can identify the pollen and therefore we can reconstruct the landscape outside in terms of what plants were growing there because they're hyenas are telling us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE The hyena poop helped you reconstruct what life outside the cave may have looked like. Our popular image of the Neanderthals, if they aren't running around grunting, is they're shivering in freezing temperatures all the time.

CLIVE FINLAYSON These people were living in a Mediterranean environment, with a wonderful view out of the cave into a landscape of olive trees and stone pine trees interspersed by freshwater lakes and herds of animals. And then all these birds on the cliffs singing. And in the woodland.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You're finding of the snowy owl helped you understand the climate better, too.

CLIVE FINLAYSON And there's a paradox there, because you could easily then ask me, Well, how come there were snowy owls there, if it was that mild and warm? Well, when you look at the levels where you find snowy owls and other Arctic birds in those levels, you still have olive trees and other Mediterranean plants and animals. What we think is happening is that conditions are so inhospitable in the north, England is covered by a kilometer of ice that nothing's living up there. So all of these Arctic birds are pushed southwards. They have no choice. So the presence of snowy owls in these Arctic birds where we are, is not necessarily indication the conditions were that cold here, but they have no room to go. You had to come south or go extinct. So we find these incredible combinations of species that you wouldn't find anywhere in the world today.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Tell me about Nana and Flint. You're the director of the Gibraltar National Museum. You commissioned forensic artists, artists who are used to reconstructing, you know, murder victims from their bones to create statues of Neanderthals. Why did you do it?

CLIVE FINLAYSON We had this Gibraltar skull that was been found in 1848, and we then had the fragments of a child's skull that had been excavated in 1926. We wanted to know what these people looked like. Now we were at a time when we had a much better picture of, if you like, the soft parts of the tissues of Neanderthals because the genome had been sequenced. So we knew this skin was pale. We knew the range of eye color. We knew the range of hair color similar to us, including red haired brown and so on. So we had a pretty good idea. We thought from these two skulls, let's reconstruct these two individuals. The Kennis brothers from the Netherlands are fantastic. They're artists, but scientists at the same time doing these incredible forensic reconstructions. We work with our friends in Zurich who are anthropologists, and they could apply the metrics to reconstruct the whole body from that. So we used a bit of poetic license in putting it together and suggesting that Nana was the grandmother of the child Flint. We knew by then that Nana was female and we knew that the boy was a boy. All that was accurate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE But they lived eons apart, presumably.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Presumably they did. So that was where we used a bit of poetic license. We wanted to break the mold from the stereotype. Traditionally, the Neanderthal is hairy, bent forwards, grumpy looking. But when you look at Nana now she's got a glint in her and she's smiling and looking at you and the boy is hanging on to granny almost a bit scared. You're looking at humans. Skulls named with a lot of originality by anthropologists Gibraltar one and Gibraltar two, no matter how many books I can write, how many papers I can write – when you put flesh to them and you call them Nana and Flint, a lot of people empathize with them. You see those people there in the museum and suddenly you go, Wow, I understand.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You regard Neanderthals, you've said, as my species. As human.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Indeed, there were differences, but we're not all the same in this planet today, either. We're all part of one human family.

BROOKE GLADSTONE We know now that Neanderthals didn't have fatal flaws like stupidity or bad hunting abilities or physical weakness or a lack of innovation. But what do we know about why they vanished?

CLIVE FINLAYSON We don't give enough importance to contingency to chance. Chance events do sometimes matter, especially when you have small populations. Neanderthals had lived across Europe and Asia for two or hundred thousand years, at least very successfully.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Their species lasted far longer than ours has.

CLIVE FINLAYSON Yeah, we have another 200,000 years to go before we catch up with the Neanderthals. They were living very successfully in these woodland environments, being omnivores, eating plants, catching animals largely by ambush hunting. And they developed this incredible muscular physique for dealing with animals at close quarters. And if we wanted to compare an Neandethal with a modern human in very broad terms. Than the Neandethal's, a wrestler and the modern human is a long distance runner. Completely different physiques. And these long distance runners were used to open environments where they could catch animals using projectile technology, and they enter Eurasia at a time when the climate is actually hitting hard and the woodland is been overrun by Steppe-Tundra. Steppe-Tundra with animals like reindeer. The world is changing completely, and my view is that the long distance runner could handle that well much better than the wrestler. If instead of getting cold at that moment, the climate had got warmer, more humid, the woodland would have expanded at the expense of tundra. Perhaps you and I today, and I say this with the greatest respect would be Neanderthals discussing the disappearance of those others who turned up in Europe and couldn't make it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Clive, thank you very much.

CLIVE FINLAYSON It's my pleasure, and you're always welcome to come and visit us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE I will. Clive Finlayson is Director, Chief Scientist and curator of the Gibraltar National Museum. He's also author of the book The Smart Neanderthal. Cave Art, Bird Catching, and the Cognitive Revolution.

ANNALEE NEWITZ Coming up, what are evolving notions of our long vanished kin say about us?

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media.