Excavation shows early cave dwellers were no savages

While they weren’t exactly two-bedroom two-bath homes, Neanderthals still appreciated a little domestic organization, writes TOM WHIPPLE.

They might have been hairy, lived in caves and engaged in the occasional bout of cannibalism — but that doesn’t mean that Neanderthals couldn’t be houseproud, too.

An excavation of a cave in Northern Italy where the extinct human species used to live has found that they carefully arranged their accommodation so that different tasks were performed in different places. While it was not exactly a full two-bedroom two-bath, they did at least ensure that they avoided sleeping in the rotting carcasses of their dinner.

Professor Julien Riel-Salvatore, from the University of Colorado-Denver, said that the discovery should go some way toward further rehabilitating the reputation of a species that has been somewhat maligned in the past.

Key findings of his study, published in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology, were that the areas for working and preparing food were kept separate from the areas for sleeping.

“Instead of Neanderthals just discarding artifacts everywhere, there was some kind of pattern in terms of where they did their activities,” he said.

“The distribution seems to have followed some kind of logic,” Riel-Salvatore said.

As has been seen in other caves, a fire was found towards the back, which RielSalvatore interpreted as marking the living area. “They are taking advantage of the concavity of the shelter to let heat radiate along the back wall,” he said. “That helps a lot with comfort.”

What the latest excavation has added is more knowledge of how the rest of the cave was organized. By looking at discarded tools and bones, the researchers found that sharp things were kept away from these living areas — presumably so that the inhabitants did not cut themselves when wandering to the lavatory during the night — and the meals were prepared at the mouth of the cave.

“We see that stone tools are found to be concentrated towards the outside, so that sharp pieces of stones wouldn’t injure them,” RielSalvatore said. “Most animal bones also seem to be concentrated outside the shelter. They are segregating activities so as not to have rotting bones inside.”

While this is basic food hygiene for modern humans — at least if they don’t live in student accommodation — it is not something that conventional wisdom would expect of Neanderthals, who are still used as an archetype for unsophisticated behaviour despite the fact that more recent studies have suggested they might have had bigger brains than us.

“We often get a sense that before Homo sapiens there’s some kind of qualitative difference in behaviour among prehistoric humans. This ability to organize has been seen as a key difference,” Riel-Salvatore said. “Well, this study is chipping away at the preconception that Neanderthals were just like another species of large primates, rather than modern humans.”