Mountains of Memory: How Neanderthals Endured the Wild Climate of the South Caucasus

The Mountains Between Worlds

The South Caucasus is a landscape built on collision—where continents meet and mountains rise like frozen waves between Europe and Asia. During the Middle Palaeolithic, roughly 130,000 to 40,000 years ago, this rugged terrain was a crossroads for Homo species who hunted, foraged, and survived in its demanding mosaic of valleys, forests, and uplands.

Butchery marks on a fragment of long bone diaphysis from a medium-sized herbivore found in layer XIII (figure by S. Prat).

In a new study published in Antiquity¹, archaeologists led by Anna Mgeladze of the Georgian National Museum describe discoveries at a site called Ormagi Ekhi, located in Georgia’s Shida Kartli region. The findings add a fresh dimension to our understanding of how Neanderthals and their relatives thrived at ecological margins—where the stability of survival was always at the mercy of wind, cold, and changing prey.