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Insider’s view

Quentin Kean talks to the director of Gibraltar’s Heritage Museum, Clive Finlayson, whose new book brings together the many strands which make up the region and laments the march of progress

Who built that hilltop castle and what were they doing here? Was it always olive trees as far as the eye can see? What happened to the wolves? How has that cork forest survived? Why can’t I hear any birds? Where, as Pete Seeger used to sing, have all the flowers gone?

Until recently, the only way to get the answers to those kinds of question would be to hunt down a learned scientific tome or two and a couple of decent history books. But you’d still be getting only half the story. You’d have to piece together for yourself the connections between the landscape, the wildlife, the geology, the climate, the vegetation and the humans who have lived here.
A book published in the autumn makes those connections. Written by Clive Finlayson, it’s a series of tales about the land they used to call Al-Andalus and the humans that have roamed, settled and struggled here. Beautifully illustrated and immensely readable, it’s a celebration of the unique ecological diversity of the region – and a lament over its gradual destruction.

Al-Andalus is an insider’s portrait, written by a born and bred Gibraltarian with Scottish, English, Portuguese and Spanish blood in his veins. Clive has been travelling Iberia for decades, watching and ringing birds, studying the land’s ecology, researching its history and – most recently – making discoveries that shed important new light on our understanding of ancient man and the environment he lived in.

“When I was little, my father would take me out to watch birds, here in Gibraltar and in the Campo de Gibraltar,” Clive says. “Nature was my passion. When they closed the border in 1969, we were more or less confined on the Rock, so focusing on the wonderful spectacle of the bird migrations was an outlet for me. The upper Rock was a lifeline really.”

Gibraltar has known its tough times; tough times when Clive was a teenager witnessing distressed families calling to each other desperately across the sealed border; and tough times too when the first Finlayson turned up there at the end of the 18th century from Scotland.

The town had just been completely devastated by French and Spanish bombardment and the yellow fever was about to wreak havoc on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar. Both these episodes are powerfully reconstructed in Al-Andalus.

Clive’s book and his life are examples of how small chance events can shape lives, shape history. For example, desperate to study Zoology at university, he could find no one to teach him ‘A’ level biology – and then someone turned up and offered to take him on. Back in Gibraltar after a very successful university career (Liverpool and Oxford), he was working for the Civil Service when by chance the job of director of the Gibraltar Heritage Museum came up. Well short of the age of 40, he applied, and got it. He’s been there ever since, expanding its research and educational capabilities backed with funds from the Gibraltarian government and external bodies.

In between times the “greatest and happiest” of all the chance events that shaped his life had occurred. He had met and married the person who would be his permanent companion, fellow researcher and best critic, his wife Geraldine.

“It’s like a lot of things in the book. You get these contingent events that can shape the rest of your life. Had that guy not been there to teach me biology, maybe I’d have gone in another direction,” he says. “Everything in life is about that. It’s a bit annoying when you’re trying to be totally scientific and predict everything, because a lot of things are not predictable. Small-scale events can have a huge impact.”

Unpredictable events (they’re all in the book) such as the intervention of two Victorian naturalists, Abel Chapman and Walter Buck, that saved the ibex from extinction in the Sierra de Gredos. Or the Mediterranean basin filling up in just 36 years. Or Hannibal and his elephants facilitating the Roman exploitation of tuna migrations on the Cádiz coast.

Unpredictable events such as a palaeontologist called Chris Stringer turning up in Gibraltar in 1989 and asking Clive to show him Gorham’s cave. The meeting started a new focus for Clive’s work – human evolution – and led to some groundbreaking excavations and pioneering research that have changed the way the world understands the Neanderthals and their time on the planet.

Making use of the latest amazing carbon dating techniques, he and colleagues have been able to build a detailed picture for the first time of the Neanderthals’ environment. “And occasionally we’ve come up with a little bonus, like the results we published last year in Nature,” he adds.

A little bonus? What Clive and his colleagues established with those results was that the very last Neanderthals to live on the planet lived in Gorham’s Cave. The reaction, he says, was amazing: reports in over 300 magazines across the world and interviews with the media every 15 minutes for a solid week. “I was completely thrown”.

He is now working on a book that he hopes will debunk the myth of the Neanderthal. “They’re popularly seen as unintelligent brutes that were incapable of doing anything,” he says with passion. “But they survived on the planet three times longer than we have so far, so they couldn’t have been that bad at it. If we’re still here in 200,000 years time, maybe we can then start talking about it.”
In the meantime he’s hoping that his current book will help people become aware about what man has done and continues to do to the territory of Al-Andalus.

“If we wanted to resolve our problems collectively, we could,” he says. “I hope that the book can get people to think. Everything that each one of us does helps. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us all, but we’ve seen in the past how a handful of people can save a species.”

Santana Books is offering Al Andalus‚ by Clive Finlayson at a special price for laluz readers. Order your copy for €19.90 (a 20% discount) and you get free postage and packing if delivery address is in Spain.

Telephone orders to Santana Books on 952 485 838 or email sales@santanabooks.com quoting 'Finlayson'.

Payment by credit card or cheque drawn on a Spanish bank to Apdo 41, 29650 Mijas-Pueblo, (Malaga). Please remember to include your name and address for delivery and telephone no. for necessary contact. Offer valid until end of February 2008.