THEY HAD FAMILIES
Neanderthals seem to have lived in small, family-orientated groups, with daily lives built on close emotional bonds. Birth was probably risky, and infants would have needed nursing and carrying for more than a year. Children joined in adult activity early: heavy work marked their bones, and tiny scratches on their teeth show that they learnt to eat with stone knives. At the end of life, we know that Neanderthal death traditions were complex. Scrutiny of bones from across Europe has identified cut marks showing that the bodies of the deceased were often carefully taken apart, and sometimes even eaten – a way of coping with death that’s more common in history than you might think.
But Neanderthal relationships weren’t limited to their own species. In 2010, it was revealed that modern humans ( Homo sapiens) interbred with them, and genes moved in both directions. In 2015, genetic analysis of a 40,000-year-old human jawbone from Romania found Neanderthal ancestry within only six generations. Finding such a close relationship by chance in some of the oldest European human remains is unlikely, so interbreeding was probably common at this time. The amount and diversity of Neanderthal genes in our DNA points to hundreds – if not thousands – of human-Neanderthal encounters. We don’t know who raised the resulting offspring, or if groups lived and socialised together, but these babies would have required the same devoted care and love as our own.