Cavemen
Rock, Part IX: Pre-Contact Neanderthals
So, these guys really need no introduction. Everyone has heard of Neanderthals, and
everyone knows that you’re not really supposed to say the th since it’s a German word, and no one cares. They are the closest known relatives of “modern”
humans, or Homo sapiens, outside their own species. As the popular-science narrative goes, Neanderthals
lived across western Eurasia from 400,000 years ago until their gradual
replacement by modern humans between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. The replacement process occurred gradually,
at least partially as the result of genetic admixture with modern humans. This last point is the big one, for which
credit is owed to Svante Paabo and company.
Their
(re-)discovery was monumental: most people today have Neanderthal DNA; if
that’s the case, it follows that Neanderthals and “modern” humans had children
together. This happened in the last
hundred thousand years. In other words,
most people today—myself included—are part Neanderthal.
Neanderthals, named after a 17th-century
German pseudointellectual (really!), were around between 400kya and 30kya. The name translates more or less to
“Newmandales” (really! neo “new” ander “man” thal “dale”). Here’s what they looked like:
WHAT’S
THIS??? A CHALLENGER EMERGES FOR THE
TITLE:
WHO
IS THE SMUGGEST CAVEMAN?
H. neanderthalensis vs. H. georgicus
I think it’s a draw.
As you can see, especially when compared with a more
archaic species like H. erectus georgicus, better known to us as Grandpa
George, Neanderthals looked a whole lot like us. If you look closely, you can see that their
foreheads and chins aren’t as pronounced as ours, but not noticeably so. They also had shaggy hair and a beard. We know they were (comparatively) hairless. They tended to be about a head shorter than
us, but were “denser”—much physically stronger, and consequently needed more
calories than modern humans. They had
this great little niche in the northern latitudes of Eurasia, occasionally
reaching as far south as the Levant.
They hunted big game of the forest and tundra—mammoths, et cetera. They lived lives as difficult and violent as
you might expect. Few lived past thirty,
which means I’m going to be a pretty old Neanderthal in July.
Behavior,
Spoken Language, and Technology
Now, the primary focus of this series is exploring the
development of modern human behavior.
So, how did Neanderthals act?
They looked like us, did they act like us?
It
has become fashionable in the pop-science literature to say, “we used to think
Neanderthals were dumb cavemen, but not anymore”. Well, hang on. They were cavemen. They lived in caves—at least some of the
time. A man who lives in a cave is by
definition a caveman, especially when that man happens to live in prehistoric
times. They were cavemen, or at least
many of them were. Pop culture, 1. Science nerds, 0. PROUDLY IRRELEVANT.
But
no, they weren’t dumb—well, at least, they weren’t incapable of learning, and
in fact they were almost—almost—on
par with people today in terms of behavior and cognitive ability. The more we examine Neanderthal behavior, the
more we come to understand a creature whose ways were almost like ours…behavior that is conclusively pre-modern, but that
tiptoes on the edge of modernity. Toward
the end of their tenure, they ran into us—that is, modern humans—which may have
exposed them to new ideas and technologies that they didn’t come up with on
their own, but were quite happy to borrow from us. By the time they disappeared, Neanderthals
were creating art, music, and ritual items.
But these phenomena only arose after contact with H. sapiens—so,
what about beforehand?
I
recently got a question asking about Neanderthals and spoken language. We think right now that Neanderthals could
speak, given the skeletal and genetic evidence—their voice boxes and ears were
as fine-tuned for speech as ours, and Neanderthal remains have yielded FOXP2,
the famous “language gene”. But just
because they could, doesn’t mean they did.
It could also be that Neanderthals had a language that worked,
cognitively, for the Neanderthal brain, but wouldn’t work cognitively for ours. Or maybe Neanderthals had language, but it
was simple and easy to pick up, which contributed to our eventual triumph—we
could learn their language, but they couldn’t learn ours. We don’t know.
The
pre-contact Neanderthal tool type is known as the Mousterian tradition, which emerged from the Acheulean (remember
that?). The Mousterian tradition is
characterized by a complex flaking procedure known as the Lavallois teachnique:
(1)
(2)
I
am not even a fraction as cool as John Shea, my paleoanthropology hero. Being one of the most badass flintknappers
this side of the Great Rift Valley, he’d be able to tell us a lot more about
the Lavallois Technique than I could. All I know is that it’s quite difficult
and not something you get simply by banging rocks together. It was a cognitive skill that required
mastery in order to survive, and Neanderthals were quite good at it. Even better than John “the Titan” Shea.
Once
we’ve made a spearhead with the Lavallois Technique, we need to stick that
sucker on a shaft. How, you say? Check this out: Neanderthals could make glue
using a complex chemical process. That’s
right, they were chemists too. In what
is now Modern Italy, Neanderthals figured out how to make glue from birchbark (3),
a complicated step-by-step process that you or me couldn’t for the life of us
work out on our own. So with
Neanderthals, even pre-contact Neanderthals, we’re seeing more complexity and
elaborateness than ever before. We’re
not, however, seeing adaptation.
Neanderthals did one thing, did it well, and kept doing it. Neanderthal technology seems to have changed
very little over a very long time—until they ran into us.
Neanderthal
Church
Early
on, we talked about how one of the marks of behavioral modernity, or
“peoplehood”, is a sense of the spiritual. Could Neanderthals have had this sense? Neanderthals are the descendants of H. antecessor and H. heidelbergensis; indeed, the academic lumpers among us would
call H. heidelbergensis an early kind
of Proto-Neanderthal. Do you remember where, behaviorally, we were
with heidelbergensis? They were deliberately disposing of their
dead in the same place, and it may just be that they had some conception of an
afterlife—the beautiful Excalibur
hand-axe perhaps the world’s oldest extant burial offering. The Neanderthals stood on their shoulders,
and seemed to have developed a genuine sense of the spiritual or religious—a
key marker of behavioral modernity.
One site that suggests some sort of
spiritual activity is—and this is a real trip—the mysterious stone rings of
Bruniquel Cave, in modern France (4).
The site consists of these, well, stone rings, made from broken
stalagmites and apparently consciously arranged. This site, furthermore, is so deep into the
bowels of the cave that its builders must have had some way of carrying fire
there for illumination—and, indeed, ashes remain smudged on the surrounding
rocks to this day. The builders of these
circles must have had some means of bringing the fire this deep into the
cave—torches or embers, perhaps, with slow-burning fuel. Modern humans were not at this time present
in France—these structures had to have been made by Neanderthals.
(5)
(6)
What
were they? Winter shelters? Properly rid of bears etc., the deep interior
of a cave provides a toasty place to hole up for a few months if you have
fire—which, as we see, they did. The
Bruniquel circles might be the remains of huts.
But
if that were the case, we’d see trash heaps and other signs of habitation. At Bruniquel, we don’t. It doesn’t appear that anyone lived here—just
that they arranged the circles and completed their non-residential business
therewith. What was going on down
there? It’s a maddening question. Could we be seeing the remains of some sort
of cultic shrine? What else would be
down that deep in a cave, with no signs of other use, with structures that took
time and labor to make? Perhaps the
structures are ritual, perhaps not.
Perhaps they served a purpose, one that would be eminently clear to a
Neanderthal, but unclear to us. We don’t
know. Maybe they could’ve explained the
structures’ purpose us, using conventional language, or maybe they could explain to
one another in a language that is inherently unlearnable by Homo sapiens.
Just
how big was the gap? Again, we don’t
know. At any rate, however, there is something, some inherent difference,
between humans and Neanderthals. As
things are right now, we just don’t know what it is. We’ll take a few guesses at those differences
later on, when we discuss what happened when they met modern humans.
Sources
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