Origin
All Gibraltar Barbary macaques are descended from North African populations of Barbary macaques. DNA evidence has established beyond doubt the present population is of relatively recent Algerian and Moroccan origin. No traces were found of a third source for their DNA, namely of any ancient, no longer surviving Iberian population. An earlier theory, now disproven by the DNA evidence, was that the original Gibraltar macaques were a remnant of populations that had spread throughout Southern Europe during the Pliocene, up to 5.5 million years ago. The Macaca sylvanus species is listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List and is declining. About 75% of the total population is found in the Middle Atlas mountains.
During the Pleistocene, this species inhabited the Mediterranean coasts and Europe, reaching as far north as Germany and the British Isles. The species decreased with the arrival of the Ice Age, to extinction in the Iberian Peninsula 30,000 years ago. The skull of a Barbary macaque was discovered during excavation in the 1970s at the pre-Christian Navan Fort in County Armagh, Ireland. Carbon dating tests suggest it died there in the third century BC.
The macaque population had been present on the Rock of Gibraltar long before Gibraltar was captured by the British in 1704. The original introduction of the macaques was most likely orchestrated by the Moors (who occupied southern Iberia, including Spain and Portugal, between 711 and 1492), who kept them as pets. In his work Historia de la Muy Noble y Más Leal Ciudad de Gibraltar (History of the Very Noble and Most Loyal City of Gibraltar), written between 1605 and 1610, Alonso Hernández del Portillo, the first chronicler of Gibraltar, wrote:
"But now let us speak of other and living producers which in spite of the asperity of the rock still maintain themselves in the mountain, there are monkeys, who may be called the true owners, with possession from time immemorial, always tenacious of the dominion, living for the most part on the eastern side in high and inaccessible chasms."
In his History of Gibraltar (1782), Ignacio López de Ayala, a Spanish historian like Portillo, wrote of the monkeys:
"Neither the incursions of Moor, the Spaniards nor the English, nor cannon nor bomb of either have been able to dislodge them."
Read more about this topic: Barbary Macaques In Gibraltar
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