The era of the Neanderthal
Neanderthals died out some 40,000 years ago, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Guardian. New discoveries are changing how we think about our long-scorned hominim relatives—and ourselves.
THERE’S A HUMAN type we’ve all met: people who find a beleaguered underdog to stick up for. But what if it’s too late? Can there be advocates for the extinct? The past few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: “Neanderthals.” They died out, it appears, 40,000 years ago. That number—40,000—is as totemic to Neanderthal specialists as that better-known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.
Some basic facts about the Neanderthals are now pretty well settled. Of the many species of hominin, they were the dominant ones from roughly 400,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago. Their brains were large, their physical strength considerable. Remains of their bodies have been found scattered widely across Europe, even as far south as Gibraltar. Why they aren’t still around remains a vexed question.
Our conjectures about the Neanderthals began in 1856, when workers in a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf discovered a cave full of bones, some of abnormal bulk. A local naturalist, with uncanny intuition, thought the bones had to be from a primitive kind of human. He sent them in a chaperoned wooden box to an anatomist in Bonn, who inspected them and came to the same conclusion. In 1863, professor William King, delivering a short paper to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, argued forcefully that the bones belonged to a creature for whom we didn’t yet have a name. He went on to propose one: Homo neanderthalensis.
Why that name? The valley where the bones were discovered had been a favorite spot for the wanderings of a 17th-century polymath and nature lover whose family name had originally been Neumann, before his ancestors rechristened themselves, fauxclassically, Neander. “Neander” was Greek for “new man,” “Thal” was German for valley. The Valley of the New Man: “Could there be any more fitting moniker for the place where we first discovered another kind of human?” asks Rebecca Wragg Sykes, the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
The discovery of those bones, and their naming in 1863, came at a time when Europe was coming to terms with the implications of the theories of Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species had been published only four years earlier, and it was becoming harder to deny that the world was older—dramatically older—than we had supposed.
I NThe Naked Neanderthal, the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak reports encountering an anthropologist at Stanford who joked, while projecting a slide of a Neanderthal skull, that “if I got on a plane and saw that the pilot had a head like that, I’d get off again.” Blunter still was the Russian academic who kept insisting that the Neanderthals were, simply, “different.” Different how? “Ludovic,” he said, “they have no soul.”
A hypothesis dating back to the 1960s offers a vivid example of the kind of evidence that can be adduced for Neanderthal intelligence. A team led by the Cambridge archaeologist Charles McBurney was excavating at a seaside cliff on the Channel Island of Jersey. An early 20th-century dig had already turned up remnants—in the form of surviving teeth—of Neanderthal occupation. But at the base of the cliff, they found an uncommonly large number of bones belonging to mammoth and rhinoceros. Why were they there?
McBurney’s field assistant, Katharine Scott, advanced an intriguing hypothesis. Could the bones be there because the mammoths had tumbled to their deaths from the high cliff that overlooked the graveyard? Scott pointed to evidence, from surviving hunter-gatherer societies, of “drive lanes” used to kill large numbers of bison. The Native American hunters who had been known to practice this kind of hunting used controlled grass fires to send the animals toward the cliff, and carefully positioned hunters to keep the animals moving. Scott’s hypothesis, if correct, attributes to the Neanderthals some quite advanced cognitive capacities. This suggests a picture of Neanderthals as well-organized, co-operative killers, with advanced communicative systems.
The old picture of Neanderthals also proposed that they had, at best, a tenuous grasp of how fire worked—perhaps they were able to use fire when they discovered it but were unable to produce it when needed. But this is quite improbable. It is difficult to sustain the idea that a relatively furless species could have survived in Europe during the glacial periods, when they appear to have thrived, without a mastery of fire.
And so the archaeological record indeed suggests. Excavation sites are full of pieces of flint that show evidence of fire making. Charcoal remains at these sites indicate that they were keenest on using resin-rich pine wood as fuel, suggesting they had decided tastes based on a long history of experimentation. They may even have learned to use bones to prolong the life of a fire, keeping them warm while they slept.
The study of ancient Neanderthal fires is itself a triumph of modern science. The name of the method—a mouthful—is “fuliginochronology,” a technique by which one turns a sooty cave into an archive, a veritable guest book of Neanderthal inhabitation. A fire burning in a cave will leave a mark in the form of “nano-scale stripes,” which, as Wragg Sykes helpfully explains, are “essentially tiny stratigraphies written in soot...formed when the fires of Neanderthals in residence ‘smoked’ the roof and walls, leaving thin soot films.” As
one band of Neanderthals left the cave and another arrived, and started a new fire, the pattern of soot would produce a sort of unique barcode. All these fires could hardly be the work of a species with a tenuous grasp of fire’s workings.
LAST YEAR, THE Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was given to the scientist whose work has put a number to just how human the Neanderthals were. Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist, was a pioneer in the study of “paleogenetics,” which began with the discovery of how DNA might be extracted from a range of sources: old bones and teeth, naturally, but also from cave sediments.
Pääbo managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from a piece of ancient bone, allowing him to publish, in 1997, the first Neanderthal DNA sequences. Thirteen years later came the publication of a full Neanderthal genome, based on DNA extracted from only three individuals.
The genome offered strong support to what had previously been only a hypothesis: that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals had had a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. More significantly, it showed that when early Homo sapiens had walked from their original home in Africa into Eurasia, they had encountered Neanderthals there and interbred with them. The Neanderthals were among the genetic ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians (but not of modern Africans). Eurasians today have between 1.5 and
2.1 percent Neanderthal DNA.
Some readers of this research have found Pääbo’s conclusions a source of comfort. Those wondering what had happened to the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago had long been tempted by a dark speculation: Perhaps we, Homo sapiens, with our superior weapons and new microbes, had killed them off. But Pääbo’s conclusions give an otherwise tragic story something of a silver lining: The Neanderthals are still alive, as alive as the archaic Homo sapiens they interbred with. They live on, to use an apt cliché, in us, their (very) hybrid heirs.
Not all Neanderthal researchers, though, draw such comfort from the DNA studies. Ludovic Slimak thinks the Neanderthals no more live on “in us” than an extinct wolf lives on in the poodle who shares sections of the archaic wolf genome. In Slimak’s way of thinking about the question, the idea that there was no extinction, only a sort of “dilution,” is tantamount to a failure to see that Neanderthals were a genuinely “other” kind of humanity, neither better nor worse, and certainly not “soulless.” “That humanity,” he writes with a brutal brevity, “is extinct, totally extinct.”
THE UNAVOIDABLE TALK of “humanity” in these debates forces us to confront a more fundamental philosophical question of what exactly we take the “human” to mean in the first place. It is surprising just how affecting accounts of Neanderthal extinction can be, how often it moves otherwise sober science writers to unaccustomed pitches of lyricism.
Being a responsible scientist, Wragg Sykes is aware that “ascribing any level of formal spirituality to Neanderthals would go far beyond the archaeological evidence.” But she is convinced that we have enough evidence to be able to say that “they, too, encountered all of life’s sensory marvels. Perhaps as photons from a salmonbelly sunset saturated their retinas, or the groaning song of a mile-high glacier filled their ears, Neanderthals’ brains translated this to something like awe.”
In puzzling over the Neanderthals, we reveal something of ourselves. Why might some of us care so much about creatures so long extinct? No doubt part of the answer is that questions about the Neanderthals serve as proxies for questions about ourselves. The old fiction writer’s choice between a picture of the Neanderthals as thugs and one of them as prototypical flower children no doubt reflects anxieties about human nature that have haunted the last few centuries of our history: Are we built for war or peace?
It is, if anything, a part of human nature to resist the idea that our interests die with us: a part of our nature, and a beautiful one at that. And it makes one wonder: When the civilizations of Homo sapiens have been reduced to bones and rubble, will our successors on this planet, digging up our mounds of plastic waste, be as anxious to give us our due?
Adapted from a story originally published in The Guardian. Used with permission.