WHO WERE THE NEANDERTHALS?

The latest discoveries are painting a picture of skilled hunters and innovators with an eye for natural beauty

Advances in archaeological excavation and analysis over the past three decades have blown apart long-held misconceptions about Neanderthals. This distinct species of human emerged around 400,000–350,000 years ago and existed until 40,000 years ago. During that time span, they coped not only with cold, but also dramatically shifting climates. They were just as much people of the forest as the tundra, surviving conditions warmer than we experience today.

This ecological variety, combined with a vast geographic range, meant a diverse diet. Neanderthals were top hunters, whether of megafauna like mammoth or small game like rabbits or even tortoises.

Neanderthals were a little shorter than us on average, with powerful, well muscled bodies, wider ribs, and differently shaped pelvic bones. But they walked fully upright. The front of their chinless face was pulled forward with bigger noses and eyes.

Culturally, Neanderthals were never stuck-in-the-mud dullards. Their many stone tool technologies reveal innovation, whether at the scale of an individual flint core or in visible variations between regions and through time. They were also artisans in wood, bone and even shell. Polish and wear on their tools and teeth prove they worked animal hides, and they also produced the first synthetic material, birch tar, as an adhesive.

Modern studies support early claims for some burials. But bodies could also be carefully taken apart, sometimes eaten, with bone shards used as tools or even marked in unusual ways.

This apparent aesthetic interest in altering surfaces is echoed by incised lines on animal bones, as well as the application of pigments to objects such as fossil shells and eagle talons. Neanderthal life was never easy, but we see in them an emerging human existence that transcended bare survival.

Perhaps the greatest revolution in our understanding of Neanderthals is that they did not entirely vanish. The theory that Homo sapiens (modern humans) simply replaced Neanderthals 40,000 years ago was overturned in 2010 by DNA showing interbreeding.

4 Ernest Griset’s Neanderthal (1873) is more “civilised” than its predecessors, with a crafted stone-tipped spear among its possessions

Head-turner A reproduction of a skull of a female Neanderthal, discovered in Gibraltar in 1848. From the moment such remains began emerging from the earth, artists were mesmerised