From Science Daily: Jersey was a must-see tourist destination for Neanderthals for over 100,000 years.

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.

Wow. Now there’s a place I’d love to visit.

As part of a re-examination of La Cotte de St Brelade and its surrounding landscape, archaeologists from Southampton, together with experts from three other universities and the British Museum, have taken a fresh look at artefacts and mammoth bones originally excavated from within the site’s granite cliffs in the 1970s. Their findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers matched types of stone raw material used to make tools to detailed mapping of the geology of the sea bed, and studied in detail how they were made, carried and modified. This helped reconstruct a picture of what resources were available to Neanderthals over tens of thousands of years — and where they were travelling from. [continue]

Jerseyheritage.org has some photos on their: La Cotte de St.Brelade page, and Wikipedia’s La Cotte de St.Brelade page has more info and photos.

Up for a video? Youtube has the Natural Hisory Musuem’s Neanderthal hunters and the mammoths of La Cotte de St Brelade, which is less than 5 minutes long.