So that means that the Neanderthals – whether or not rare liaisons led to hybrids whose existence has now been expunged from the modern gene pool – really did disappear. But why did the Neanderthals, who had been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, fade away when modern humans arrived on the scene?
I needed to look more closely at the archaeological evidence: was there any difference in the way modern humans and Neanderthals were subsisting in their environment? Was there anything that could have given modern humans ‘the edge’ in Europe?
Treasures of the Swabian Aurignacian: Vogelherd, Germany
In a complete contrast to the ultra-modern Institute in Leipzig, I next visited the medieval university town of Tübingen. I walked up cobbled roads to a castle where I passed through a great arch into a courtyard, then on past a fountain and up stone steps, then turned a corner to enter the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology. At the end of a corridor plastered with posters of wonderful carved animals and birds, I found Professor Nick Conard in his office.
Nick’s office was lined with red cupboards on one side, dark wooden bookshelves on another, and wooden filing cabinets. There were two desks, each piled high with papers and books, and in one corner was a large grey safe with a map of the Swabian Jura hanging on it. Nick had spent years excavating sites around Tübingen, where he had discovered evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe. But it wasn’t just stone tools that he’d found: there had been some rather wonderful pieces of art and musical instruments. And he had some of them in the safe. I had to look away while he found the key and then started bringing small cardboard boxes over to a low table, where we sat down to open the boxes of treasures.
The first object Nick took out, dating to around 35,000 years ago, was an ivory flute. It was discovered in 2004, at a cave site called Vogelherd, lying beneath two other flutes that had been made from hollow swan bones. The ivory flute had taken much more craftsmanship, though: it had been carved out of a mammoth tusk, then split to hollow out the inside, and joined back together with something like birch pitch. There was a row of incised notches down each side, crossing the join, perhaps made to help when putting the two halves back together.
The ivory flute had been smashed up into fragments, which archaeologists had found and carefully pieced back together; the notches had also helped the archaeologists when it came to reconstructing the flute. Nick explained that, using mammoth ivory, the instrument-maker wouldn’t have been constrained by the dimensions of a hollow bird bone and so could make a much larger, longer instrument. But it also seemed to be an exhibition instrument – designed to show off the technical skill of the instrument-maker. Nick had been completely taken by surprise by this discovery. They had found mammoth ivory carvings in Vogelherd before, but this was the first indication of music that had emerged from the site. The three small flutes represented the first real evidence of music – anywhere in the world. Nick had a replica of one of the swan-bone flutes, which I tried to play with less than impressive results, not being any sort of musician. But I could at least get a series of notes out of it. More accomplished musicians have tried and produced music that sounds quite harmonious to the modern ear, with tones comparable to modern flutes or whistles.
Opening the other boxes, Nick brought out some finds from the 2006 digging season at Vogelherd, and from the nearby cave of Hohle Fels – beautiful things nestled into cut-to-fit shapes in foam inside each box. Nick lifted out a tiny ivory mammoth, just 3cm long. It was carved in the round, with naturalistic detail, its trunk hanging down and curving over to the right, and there was a tiny spike of a tail. The hind legs were shorter than the front. It seemed perfectly proportioned. The bottom surfaces of the feet were scratched in a crisscross pattern.
Then there was a lion carved in relief, again in ivory, with hatching along its back. It had a long body, and its hackles were raised. And a tiny, beautiful bird. The body of the bird had been discovered in earlier digs, and there had been much speculation about it. Was it a human torso? But then the archaeologists had discovered the head and neck – a minute fragment that could so easily have been passed over. But it fitted the body, and, suddenly, there was a bird, perhaps a duck or a cormorant, with its neck outstretched. Finally, from another small box, Nick carefully lifted out a minute lion-man. Standing just over 2cm tall, he looked like a miniature version of the famous lion-man from Hohlenstein-Stadel, near Ulm – around the corner from Hohle Fels. All of these objects dated to more than 30,000 years ago.1
But there was one more surprise. Nick opened a long box, and inside it was a long, smooth piece of stone, unmistakably carved into the shape of a penis, with the foreskin and glans carved into it at one end. We contemplated this bizarre object. Was it a hammer stone, carved in a phallic shape as a joke? Or could it be that this stone had a functional use more related to its shape? Nick was quietly amused by the find. It suggested that the people of the Swabian Aurignacian had, at the very least, a healthy sense of humour, and perhaps an even healthier sexual appetite.
The art of the Swabian Jura was fascinating, and this really is the earliest evidence of something that we can properly appreciate as art. I had seen pierced shells and ochre ‘crayons’, leaving us guessing what was drawn with them, but here were carefully executed carvings of animals, and strange therianthropic beasts – men with heads of lions. Nick said that the styles of these Aurignacian carvings were similar across different sites in the Swabian Jura, although there were many different themes. It seemed to be a time of some artistic experimentation. But recurring imagery like the lion-men from Hohlenstein-Stadel and Hohle Fels also suggested very strongly that they were made by people from the same cultural group in the Lone Valley. Many different ideas have been put forward about the meaning and function of these artefacts: some have suggested that they indicate hunting magic, and the therianthropic figures in particular have been linked to shamanism. For Nick, the discovery of the tiny waterfowl carving challenged previous interpretations of Aurignacian carvings from the Swabian Jura as representing fast and dangerous animals, with whom Palaeolithic hunters may have identified.1
‘I think the combination of these symbolic artefacts, ornaments, figurative representations and musical instruments, shows us these people have the mental sophistication of ourselves, the same creativity that we have,’ he said. ‘And we can even get insights into the system of beliefs. For instance, the examples of human depictions combined with lion features show that, at least in their iconography, they were engaging in transformation: people having a connection with the animal world, being depicted as mixed animal/human figures.’
But how could these small ivory carvings hold any clue to the survival of modern humans – and the demise of the Neanderthals? Well, certainly the Neanderthals, however intelligent and whether or not they had language like us, never produced anything like the objects found at Vogelherd. I asked Nick about the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, and it became clear that he thought culture had played a key role in the expansion of modern human, and contraction of Neanderthal, populations, during the late Pleistocene.
On their own in Europe, the Neanderthals seemed to have been getting along just fine.
‘The Neanderthals were the indigenous people of the area. They had very sophisticated technology, certainly command of fire, and knew how to get along in their environment. They had everything 100 per cent under control, and they were doing very well,’ said Nick.
‘So if they were so good at surviving in Ice Age Europe, why did they disappear?’ I countered.
‘Well, I would approach that question from an ecological point of view. If you have one organism occupying a niche, it’s going to stay there until something drives it out of its niche: either environmental change that makes it impossible to occupy the area, or another organism coming in and competing for resources.’
‘So you’re saying that modern humans were that competing organism?’
‘But why did we modern humans survive and not Neanderthals?’
‘Well, there’s no question the Neanderthals were very effective hunters, and really were at the top of the food chain. But we do see some differences in technology. I think that the innovations that modern humans developed in Europe, the Upper Palaeolithic toolkit, organic artefacts, but also figurative art, ornaments and musical instruments – these are all things that seemed to help give them an edge against the Neanderthals.’
I found it hard to imagine why art and music might have given modern humans an advantage.
‘Well, think of the lion-man,’ said Nick. ‘There’s a lion-man from this valley, and a lion-man from the Auch Valley. It’s the same iconography, the same system of beliefs, the same mythical structure, and they’re the same people. And we don’t see those kinds of symbolic artefacts with Neanderthals, so it seems that their social networks were much smaller than those of modern humans.
‘And from my point of view,’ he continued, ‘the evidence even at this time, 35,000 years ago, is completely unambiguous: music was a really key part of human life. It’s not entirely clear how that would give you a major biological advantage over the Neanderthals, but it seems to fit into this complex of symbolic representation, larger social networks. Perhaps music helped to form the glue that held these people together.
‘When the competitor arrived, the Neanderthal way of doing things wasn’t as effective in the face of people who had new ways of doing things, new technology, new culture and social networks,’ explained Nick.
Whereas competition for an ecological niche seemed to have spurred modern humans on to develop wider social networks, the Neanderthals appeared to be ‘culturally locked in’. It was a competition that modern humans would eventually win. Nick explained that, while their respective territories probably shifted back and forth over the centuries and millennia, Neanderthals were, on average, retreating while modern humans expanded.
‘In regions like the Levant, we have good evidence for movement back and forth of the two populations. It’s certainly not the case that modern humans always immediately expanded at the cost of Neanderthals; there are some good examples of Neanderthals displacing early modern humans, too.
‘When the new people came in, resources got tight, and modern humans were able to develop new technologies and new solutions quicker than the Neanderthals. In a sense there was a continual cultural arms race going on. And here, in this setting, it seems like a lot of innovations took place that gave the modern humans a bit of an edge. But it wasn’t a sudden, blanket devastation of the Neanderthals: there was a lot of give and take, but, ultimately, they were pinched out demographically.’
‘So do you think modern humans and Neanderthals were actually in contact with each other?’ I asked.
‘Well, in some areas, there were fairly dense populations of Neanderthals. And I think they did meet. And I think they would have been checking each other out from a distance, often avoiding each other. That was probably the most common scenario, but there may have been times when they came together, in peaceful co-existence, and times when there was quite a bit of conflict.’
‘What do you think about the question of interbreeding?’
‘Any place where people come together, interbreeding is the most normal thing in the world. So I think there were occasionally encounters where interbreeding took place, but not very often, and so it didn’t contribute very much to our genetic make-up or our anatomy.’
While it’s difficult – even impossible – to summarise the interactions that may have occurred between the two populations over so many thousands of years, the question ‘Why did we survive to the present while Neanderthals disappeared?’ is still relevant. Even if members of the two species never came face to face, they were in competition with each other in the landscape. And there was archaeological evidence for different subsistence strategies, which, for modern humans, included different and possibly more flexible technology, as well as culture and complex social networks, which may ultimately explain why we are here today and the Neanderthals aren’t.
Later that day, Nick took me to Vogelherd itself, in the lush Lone Valley, where excavations were ongoing. A team of archaeological technicians and students were busy digging down through the spoilheap (or ‘backdirt’) of the original excavation, finding plenty of evidence that had been discarded by the first archaeologists who dug there.
‘The site was first dug in 1931, and all of the material was dumped outside the cave,’ explained Nick as we walked past the cave entrance. ‘We’re systematically digging through it all to find out what they missed.’
It looked like a very pleasant place to be digging. The cave was set on a hill above an idyllic, lush, green valley. I asked Nick what it would have been like 35,000 years ago.
‘If you’re talking about the Ice Age, you think of ice: white, stark, and inhospitable. That’s wrong. I mean, it was cold in the winter, but in the spring and summer it would be more like it is today: lots of grass, greenery, really abundant fodder for the animals. Just think about a mammoth: the archetypal animal of the Ice Age. A mammoth eats about one 150 kilos of grass every day to stay alive. The mammoth steppe was a very rich environment, and at these sites in the Lone Valley we see abundant remains of woolly rhino, mammoth, reindeer, horses, all kinds of animals.’
‘But it must have been very cold during the winter here?’ I suggested.
‘Well, yes. But humans – and Neanderthals – can live almost anywhere as long as there’s something to eat, and materials, particularly hides, to make clothing out of, and controlled use of fire.’
Nick wandered around the site, visiting trenches to see what finds had emerged that day. These included fragments of flint blades, quite typical of Aurignacian toolkits. The sediment was being bagged up as it was removed, and would be sieved. It was only through this careful sifting of the soil that Nick’s team had found the fragments of ivory that made up the ivory flute, and the head of the bird carving.
But Vogelherd had contained disappointments as well as revelations. On first excavating it in 1931, archaeologists dug out some 300m3 of sediment from inside the cave, finding Middle and Upper Palaeolithic artefacts in distinct layers. The latter included a rich collection of Aurignacian tools and artefacts, which have since been radiocarbon dated to 30,000 to 36,000 years ago. The archaeologists also found modern human remains including two crania and a mandible, embedded in the Aurignacian layer. These bones, in association with the Aurignacian tools, seemed to provide conclusive evidence that modern humans were the makers of this technology. The findings from Vogelherd tallied with the discoveries at the Cro-Magnon rockshelter in France, where modern human skeletal remains – ‘Cro-Magnon Man’ – had been found associated with Aurignacian tools.2 This link between modern humans and a particular technology meant that archaeologists could assume the presence of modern humans, in the absence of skeletal remains, when they found Aurignacian tools and artefacts. At other sites, Neanderthal remains had been found associated with Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic) tools. So it seemed that each of these populations had a clear ‘signature’ that archaeologists could use to map out their sites and territories in Europe.
In 2004, Nick Conard and his colleagues published radiocarbon dates for the skeletal remains from Vogelherd: they dated to a mere 4000 to 5000 years ago. It looked as if they were intrusions from late Neolithic burials near the cave entrance. The ‘association’ with the Aurignacian layers in the cave was incidental. This disappointing result had wide implications. Vogelherd had been a key site for demonstrating that modern humans made the Aurignacian. And in 2002, radiocarbon dates had been published for the Cro-Magnon skeletal remains as well, showing them to
be about 28,000 years old: too young for the Aurignacian tools in the rockshelter, although nowhere near as young as the Vogelherd bones had turned out to be.2 The identification of modern human sites through Aurignacian tools alone was starting to look decidedly shaky.
Vogelherd, along with a generous scattering of other Aurignacian sites, including Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle in Germany, and Willendorf in Austria, had also been used to support the theory that the ‘Danube Corridor’ provided a route for the early modern human colonisation of central Europe.3 But the radiocarbon dates of the Vogelherd and Cro-Magnon bones meant that archaeologists could no longer assume that the spread of Aurignacian technology represented the ingress of modern humans in Europe. As shocking a suggestion as it may seem to Palaeolithic archaeologists who have relied on Aurignacian tools as signs of modern humans, there was now nothing to suggest that this was a reasonable assumption to make. Indeed, there was nothing now to refute the hypothesis that Neanderthals might have made those tools and even those beautiful ivory carvings and flute from Vogelherd.2
When I interviewed Nick, however, he did not seem like a man about to consign a lifetime’s work to the dustbin of prehistory. There was still reason to think that it was modern humans who made the Aurignacian. The Oase skull and mandible showed that modern humans were in Europe, close to the Danube, by 40,000 years ago. The Aurignacian appears suddenly in Swabia, and is always ‘on top of ’, i.e. later than, Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic) archaeology, and in some places where both Middle and Upper Palaeolithic artefacts have been found, there has been a distinct gap, an ‘occupation hiatus’ between them.1 It seems too much of a coincidence to think that the existing, Neanderthal population of Europe would have started manufacturing a completely new-looking toolkit just as modern humans arrived on the scene: it seems more likely that it was the moderns who brought that technology in.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 29