Gib museum at Oxford seminar

Museum Director, Professor Clive Finlayson, has been invited to give the key note paper at a seminar to be held at the University of Oxford in January. Organised by the School of Archaeology, the seminar will address a question that has remained unanswered in this scientific field: when and how did people occupy desert and semiarid regions of the Eurasian mid-latitude belt in prehistory?

Professor Finlayson, now regarded as a leading world authority in the field of human

origins and also a scientist of the prestigious Academia Europaea, was the first to introduce the concept of a Mid-latitude Belt which once stretched from Gibraltar in the west to China in the east. At different times, global climate change turned this belt from a land of lush savannah and wetland to a veritable desert. Many parts – the Sahara, Arabia, Thar Desert in India, the Central Asian deserts – are arid lands today but they were not always so.

“Some people may find it hard to believe that Gibraltar was the western extreme of this wide belt of lands which was the stage for our origins” declared Professor

Finlayson “but our research confirms that it was so, acting as a refuge for the last Neanderthals and as part of the pump that catapulted us to today”.

The fieldwork which Professor Finlayson and his team have been conducting for two decades now is revealing the detail of the environments that were the key to human survival and how these were altered as climate changed, lessons that we can draw from in trying to predict future events.

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