The Neanderthal cave found at the site of Portimão’s new water treatment plan is proving to be an exciting find with a new entrance discovered outside the building area allowing researchers access to a network of tunnels and spaces created by the scouring action of water.
Professor Nuno Bicho from the University of the Algarve is delighted that, under the direction of the Regional Directorate of Culture of the Algarve, Águas do Algarve has offered to pay to install a gate to protect the recently discovered entrance so he and his team can work away carefully analysing artifacts in the cave where Neanderthal man lived between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.
The entrance is right next to the EN125 at Companheira so the protection offered by a gate is a necessary precaution to deter unwanted visitors who unwittingly may destroy the fragile traces of our remote ancestral cousins.
The finds so far include flint and stone tools, and the remains of animal bones, meaningless to the untrained eye but a vital cache of research information to the trained archaeologists.
Nuno Bicho said the cave entrance is "completely outside the work perimeter, so Águas do Algarve had no legal responsibility to install the gate. The company wanted to go beyond its legal responsibility and secure the entrance so the researchers can work without worry.
Next there will be geo-electrical surveying work to discover the extent of the tunnel network.
Despite all the care being taken to preserve and survey the caves, the main contracting is going ahead as the interesting part of the archaeological find luckily is outside the area where the new plant is being constructed.
The cave next to the EN125 was known to some locals and was spotted by contractors when the new bridge over the Arade was built in the 90s but it had never been identified for what it really was, so never was investigated by scientists.
Professor Bicho said he now has “flint tools, typical of the Middle Paleolithic period, when Neanderthal man lived, and some bones probably from animals that were hunted and eaten such as rabbit, deer and aurochs – the forefathers of today's cattle."
Some of the materials will be sent for dating at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.
The team seems to have developed a renewed interest in caves as the Professor wants next to investigate more fully the Ibn Ammar cave on the other side of the river and is to submit a project to fund this work in which he wants to determine any relationship between the two caves.
