Highly satisfactory results. But then a truly remarkable find was made. In a sediment-filled hanging crevice along one wall of the shelter, the ceremonial burial of a female and a young child was unearthed, somewhat scattered and with fewer than half the bones still present, but with the remains of the female’s skeletal arms tenderly cradling the remains of the child to her skeletal breast. The conclusion was inescapable: they were mother and child. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in a Stone Age burial. The poignant photographs, retouched for emphasis but essentially accurate, that were shown on TV news programs from pole to pole, soon established them as Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy: the First Family.

That would have been extraordinary enough, but when the bones were sent to the Horizon Foundation’s anthropology laboratory for detailed study by an interdisciplinary team, the results were even more amazing. The three-person team, of which Gideon was the lead scientist, issued a thorough, meticulous report indicating that the female, who was in her mid-twenties (an old woman in Paleolithic terms), was not Neanderthal at all, but human. This sent a shock wave through the world of prehistoric archaeology: it had now been irrefutably shown for the first time that humans and Neanderthals could and did live together, at least in this one case, and that the human – an outsider, an alien female – had been ceremonially buried with the love and respect due a member of the clan. (The ceremonial nature of the burial was established by red stains on the bones, indicating that the bodies had been wrapped in an ocher-stained skin, the pigment of which had been absorbed by the skeletons as the shroud decayed.)