Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  If the world of the Neanderthal people was a tough one as a whole, with a struggle for life in circumstances of hardship and heavy labour, there were particular times and places where things were more congenial. Putting together both the finds of Neanderthal bones and of the Mousterian tools that are commonly associated with them, it becomes clear that there were two centres of Neanderthal life where occupation of sites was well maintained by local populations of some numbers: south-west France, with its abundance of classic Mousterian sites and Neanderthal remains, and the Levantine region in the Middle East, with long sequences of Mousterian occupation and important discoveries of Neanderthal types (and, importantly, of non-Neanderthal types, too, as we shall see). Elsewhere in the Eurasian range of Neanderthal Man, occupation was more intermittent, with fewer finds of both tools and bones, in a way that suggests that these regions were inhabited when climate and food supply encouraged it and abandoned when resources thinned in unfavourable times. In Europe and Western Asia (not including the Levant), the long years of the Neanderthal heyday from the Last Interglacial into the first phases of the last ice age, do not show evidence for other types of human being than the Neanderthalers or for other types of tool kit than their Mousterian tradition until the arrival of the Crô-Magnon people and the main traditions of the Upper Palaeolithic at around 40,000 BP. But, of course, the rest of the world was not all empty (though parts of it still were, like the Americas). In Africa and the Far East, other descendants of Homo erectus and related forms were continuing on their way, with different toolmaking traditions. For much of the time in Africa, the contemporaries of the Eurasian Neanderthalers were making tools of broadly the same sort as the Mousterian (with differences of detail), and we can usefully lump all such tool types into the category of the Middle Palaeolithic, to distinguish them from the Upper Palaeolithic tools of the Crô-Magnons (and their close relatives in the rest of the world) and the Lower Palaeolithic ones of the sort that we saw were being found in ancient river gravels in Europe in the nineteenth century. But there were episodes during Middle Palaeolithic times in Africa (called Middle Stone Age by African specialists) when different tool types foreshadowing the blade techniques and bone-working of the Upper Palaeolothic put in various appearances and when human types generally judged to be more like modern Homo sapiens sapiens than the Neanderthalers also occur in the (admittedly meagre) fossil record. In the Levantine region we sometimes encounter during the millennia of the Neanderthal ascendancy in Europe forms of humanity much closer to Homo sapiens sapiens but still in association with thoroughly Mousterian tools, indicating if nothing else that the linkage between Neanderthal Man and the Mousterian is not a simple matter. While the ice age raged in northern Europe, North Africa and the Levant experienced cooler but, more significantly, drier times than before, as did the rest of Africa and the world in general. If the Neanderthal people were a local adaptation to cold conditions, then equally the rest of the world’s human populations were profoundly influenced by the global climate of the ice age, which played a crucial part in the evolution and spread of modern humanity. In later chapters we will piece together the evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens and review the rival theories as to how that evolution came about. Before that, the Neanderthal way of life and the achievements of these people deserve to be described.

  Neanderthal Technology

  We think of the Neanderthal folk as people of the ice and snows, living in caves, and for many of them that is a just picture of their life. The west European Neanderthalers did occupy caves which we may call their homes, even if some of them also set up temporary camps in the open air from time to time. Where there were no caves, further to the east on the Russian steppe, for example, open-air sites with some sort of constructed shelter were the only option. We know much more about the cave sites than the open-air ones because, historically, it was the cave sites of Western Europe that were first explored by archaeologists and also because open-air sites are harder to find. Many of them have disappeared under deep loess deposits or under the rising postglacial seas and, in any case, are less likely to come to light than archaeological evidence in inviting caves. Caves, moreover, aid the survival of archaeological material and are long-lasting repositories which can preserve the record of remote millennia for millennia more. At least, the limestone caves of Europe are relatively long-lasting and good for preservation – in other parts of the world, caves can be positively destructive of bone, for example, or be more quickly eroded away in themselves.

  In south-west France the limestone caves of the Périgord region made ideal homes for the Neanderthal people, as they did for their Crô-Magnon successors. There were good supplies of flint to hand and the caves were often sited in small river valleys that offered protection against the worst of the weather. The Neanderthalers liked south-facing caves, for obvious reasons of sunshine and wind avoidance, and caves at some height above the valley floor offered refuge from floods and good game-watching vantage points. The Périgordian region during the last ice age was, in fact, an exceptionally benign place in which to live. Being nearer to the Atlantic Ocean, even when sea level was low, than northern and central zones of Europe, it enjoyed a rather maritime climate with cooler summers that permitted an extension of tundra and steppe over its higher plateaux; thanks to its latitude, its year-round high levels of sunshine favoured the growth of the ground plants needed by reindeer, bison and horse as the overall climate came and went from full glacial to interstadial conditions. Winters were mildish for the ice age, with good forage for large herds. Up on the plateaux it might be tundra, but the sheltered valleys could be quite wooded, while the east to west slope of France’s Massif Central down to the Atlantic coast made for a rapid gradient of ecological change, so that animals never needed to migrate far from summer to winter and men never needed to travel far from home to find an abundant supply of meat. In the valleys, they could watch from their caves for the coming up and down of the seasonal herds, literally sitting on their migration routes: it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  In France, too, many open-air sites of the Neanderthal people have been discovered, particularly up on the plateaux, but they never yield as much archaeological material as the caves. In Central and Eastern Europe, where caves were unavailable, such open-air sites as have been discovered were mostly located near water – both because water was a good place to be for people and animals, and also because the sedimentation potential of lakes and stream courses has aided archaeological preservation – whereas erosion has presumably blown away other sites out in the open. Some of the open-air sites from Germany through Central Europe across to Russia have provided valuable information about Neanderthal Man and his way of life. From Molodova, for example, in the Ukraine, comes evidence that has been interpreted as the remains of wind-break structures, or even a large tent: a ring, up to about 8 × 5 m in size, of mainly mammoth bones enclosing a dense concentration of stone tools, animal bones and ash. A suggestion of an entrance structure on the east side of the ring has been detected, and more ash was reported on the north side of the enclosed circle of debris, suggesting the possibility that this was where people slept, close to a fire. It is unlikely, perhaps, that the mammoth bones of Molodova were the anchorage of some completely roofed-over tented structures but wind-breaks seem likely, though we must always be aware of the possibility that accidents of arrangement as a result of nature (like slope wash in floods) might partly account for features like this. Three similar circles of mammoth bones covered in loess, found near Cracow in Poland, have been attributed to Neanderthalers. At Ripiceni-Izvor in Romania an oval structure of stones and mammoth tusks with Mousterian tools has been interpreted as perhaps a hut emplacement of some sort, or a symbolic collection of objects that meant something to the Neanderthalers of the place. At Rheindahlen in Germany a shallow pit in loess deposits that probably date to the early part of the last ice age contained burnt Mousterian flints and evidence of post holes, and a 5 m dia
meter setting of stones with ash and Mousterian tools is reported at Il’skaya in the Caucasus. At Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in Germany a structureless bivouac in a gully is evidenced by the finding of Mousterian flint tools together with an apparent club of reindeer antler (a rare find of a non-stone artefact for a Mousterian context) in association with the bones of reindeer, mammoth, bison and horse, to the accompaniment of pollen remains indicating a subarctic environment with few trees.

  Molodova’s ring of mammoth bones, with reconstruction drawing of a possible tent represented by the archaeological remains; with thanks to Dr John Wymer.

  From the west European caves more evidence of built structures is available, and some of it goes back a long way in time. In the Grotte du Lazaret, near Nice, at a date during the last ice age but one (and so before the Last Interglacial times of the first real Neanderthalers), claims for some sort of skin tent within the cave have been advanced, on the basis of arrangements of large stones out from the cave wall that might have supported timber struts for a covering of skins up to the rock face above. Such structures are entirely plausible and have possible antecedents from even earlier times in the history of man, as we shall see; the shelter afforded by any cave could be enhanced with man-made alterations and, no doubt, often needed to be. At Lazaret what might be openings in the hypothesized tents seem to point away from the cave mouth and finds of wolf and fox foot bones, without the rest of the skeletons, inside these ‘tents’ have been thought to indicate the use of animal pelts as bed coverings. (Similar finds elsewhere, including beaver, cat and rabbit foot bones, may also point to the use of pelts in clothing.) The two patches of ash at Lazaret that mark ancient fires, with stone tools around them evidently made and used on the spot, are edged with small marine mollusc shells, prompting the excavator to suggest that seaweed had been used as bedding around the fires, with its inevitable concomitant of these tiny sea creatures. Another early site, the Grotte Vaufrey in the Périgord, affords evidence suggesting that people worked by day in the lighted area of the south wall of the cave and slept out of the draughts along the dark north wall by night, with areas of burnt bone remains to show where they cooked. The cave of Baume-Bonne in the Basses-Alpes, another early site (of the penultimate ice age), boasts 10 sq m of cobbles brought up from the local river and laid down, for all the world as though to take care of a puddled area in the cave, with the smoothest and roundest surfaces of the stones uppermost, and there are other similar cases. On sites that do strictly belong to Neanderthal times, further evidence of built structures has been claimed. At the Cueva Morin in Spain collapsed piles of stones have been interpreted as a low dry-stone wall constructed across a narrow part of the cave mouth, delineating a dense area of debris, including Mousterian tools, resulting from human occupation. At Pech de l’Azé I, in the Dordogne, a dry-stone wall of 2 m in length but only 25 cm high, has been discovered. La Baume des Peyrards has a similar ‘wall’, but higher at up to 70 cm, delimiting an area against the rock face, with ash and Mousterian tools behind it. A semicircular wall of interlocked reindeer antlers has been claimed at the Mousterian site of Roc en Paille.

  The ash encountered in concentrations at Mousterian sites testifies to the Neanderthal people’s use of fire: not surprising, since use of fire was by Neanderthal times an already ancient accomplishment of evolving humanity, and survival in the subarctic conditions faced by the Neanderthalers is inconceivable without control of fire. Fire gave warmth, light, heat for cooking and defence against predatory animals. A charred piece of birch from Krapina is thought to be the remains of a fire-making twirl stick. But Neanderthal hearths in the sense of specially constructed places for fire are fewer and harder to identify with certainty than the mere ash piles that are a regular feature of their sites. They seem often to have just lit a small fire (40–50 cm across) on the existing ground surface of the cave, without preparation and of short duration to judge from the shallow penetration of heat effects under the ash. Sometimes the fires were larger, up to 1 m across, and quite irregular in shape. It is not always easy to decide how much additional structure some Mousterian fires possessed: claims of stone circles to contain the fire run up against the fact that stones tend to litter the cave floors everywhere and those around a fire can quite accidentally look as though they were arranged in a circle. Paved and stone encircled hearths have been reported in pre-Mousterian, pre-Neanderthal contexts, let alone Mousterian ones. Certainly, the hearths of some of the latest Neanderthalers we know of, at Arcy-sur-Cure, do seem to have been artificially constructed, at about 37,000 BP, but these were Neanderthal folk who had somehow progressed beyond the Mousterian culture – we shall return to them and their special status later.

  Deliberate scooping out of a depression to make a hearth has been claimed at Pech de l’Azé II, with a lead-in vent for a flue, but the example was very small – only 15–25 cm in diameter – and looks like a fire for light rather than heat or cooking, deep as it is in the cave. Limestone slabs around a shallow fire-bowl are reported at la Grotte de Hauteroche, Charente, and stones were found around a hearth on a Mousterian site at Vilas Ruivas in Portugal. At Kebara in Israel, hearths were at best bowl-shaped depressions, but interestingly the ash (of local oak) contained the remains of carbonized wild peas. In contrast, recent claims have been made for a Spanish site at Capellades, about 55 km north-east of Barcelona, with rudimentary furnaces for the shaping of utensils (in clay, presumably) which so far outshine any other Neanderthal provisions for the use of fire that judgement on them must be withheld pending full archaeological report. Wooden items of manufacture are also reported on this site, which are rare but not wholly absent in other Mousterian contexts. Certainly, the ‘hearths’ of the Neanderthalers in general do not display the technological advances of those of the Upper Palaeolithic people who came after them in Europe, and who regularly built their fire in stone-lined and flued hearths. There is, moreover, no good evidence that the Neanderthal people employed rock-heated pits in their cooking, so their cuisine found perhaps only limited use for fire in the preparation of the meat they ate, despite the presence of burnt bones on their sites. It was perhaps not only the development of better tools that did away with the need for powerful chewing (and vice-like) jaws as humanity evolved towards modern Homo sapiens sapiens, but also the invention of better cooking techniques. It has been further suggested that the Neanderthalers used fire in their caves to create defrosting chambers just as much as to cook (and give light and comfort), thereby exploiting a subsistence niche all of their own among the carnivores of their world: based on their unique ability to thaw out frozen carcasses, useless to their animal competitors, of large meat-bearing creatures that they did not need to hunt, only to scavenge. Use for long-term food storage has been proposed for a few pits discovered on Mousterian sites in France like Combe Grenal, where the feature was 90 cm wide and 40 cm deep, and le Moustier and la Quina – in some cases apparently covered over with limestone slabs. Human burial, or the intention of it at least, might be the explanation of these pits, but meat storage over winter is as likely in the light of the absence of human bones. Such pits must have been hard to dig in the consolidated cave deposits and digging sticks of bone or wood, not preserved or discovered, are indicated. A post hole for a wooden post was excavated at Combe Grenal, 4 cm in diameter and 20 cm deep, in a Mousterian context containing many of the so-called ‘denticulate’ tools that we conjecture were for woodworking purposes, or for cutting meat into strips. The wooden post of the hole at Combe Grenal may have been part of a drying rack for strips of meat.

  Studies of the spatial distribution of features on Mousterian sites in France suggest that relatively small numbers of people were living on them, able to conduct separate activities in different areas. There is no consistent pattern of placing for hearths, though Combe Grenal does show large centrally located fireplaces. Both the knapping of flint tools and the use of these tools seem to have been carried on close to the hearths, where the concentratio
ns of animal bones also occur, though large bones are sometimes encountered at the margins of the living areas centred on the hearths. There is some evidence to suggest that simpler tools, like the notched denticulates, were used close to the hearths and better tools were employed on the margins, perhaps to process the bigger pieces of meat whose bones are found there. (All of this quite lacks the sophistication of arrangements found in the later Upper Palaeolithic contexts in the same region and sometimes in the same caves.) The caves of south-west France can be seen as the homes of the Neanderthal folk of the region, provided that we do not load too many sentimental associations on the word home; the open-air sites of the same area were probably kill-sites (or scavenging places) and camps for the acquisition of raw materials, of limited duration. The same situation obtained in the Levant and the Middle East with cave occupations and open-air sites, but in Central and Eastern Europe open-air sites were the only homes they had, a circumstance that strengthens claims for shelters and perhaps more complicated structures in these regions. Where there were caves, the Neanderthalers seem to have been rather sedentary folk, content to eke out whatever living they could (and, in some areas like south-west France, that living could be pretty good) without continually moving on or fetching in their resources from very far away.

  Most of the tools and weapons used by the European Neanderthalers were made of stone acquired close to home, usually within only a few kilometres of the sites where the archaeologists find them, as far as south-west France is concerned. There is evidence that the best raw material for the most elaborate items might have been fetched from a little further away than the stone used for more run-of-the-mill products and on the plains of Central and Eastern Europe fetching distances were greater, but even then do not compare with those travelled by raw material in the Upper Palaeolithic. Stone tools are, of course, the most easily and therefore best preserved of all the productions of our remote forebears. They constitute the absolutely unmissable remains of archaeological sites of these remote epochs, and were collected and classified from the earliest days of archaeology in the last century, when much other evidence was ignored and unrecognized. Wood cannot often survive from the times of the Neanderthal folk and items made of bone or antler have not been frequently recovered from Mousterian sites, but stone tools survive in abundance and quite naturally have become the basis for archaeologists’ attempts to subdivide the overall Mousterian tool tradition into recognizable ‘cultural’ packages with geographic or chronological identities. If such distinct communities of toolmakers could be shown to have existed in certain times and places, then a broad picture of Mousterian development through time and space might be painted, with implications for the evolution of Neanderthal Man and his relationship to what has come after him in his former homelands. Quite legitimately this sort of typological study of tool forms can be, and often has been, carried on without any concomitant study of what the tools were used for, however interesting that might be. In fact, microscopic study of the wear on the edges of Mousterian tools seems to indicate that many of the tools, of whatever type, were used for woodworking – an interesting finding in itself, if correct, for reminding us of the likely importance of wood in the overall technology of the Neanderthalers. Some Mousterian ‘points’, a technical term for a certain sort of pointed flake of stone, bear tip breakage consistent with use as projectile points, as well as facets at their bases that look like provision for hafting, while others suggest themselves as butchery tools; all this we might expect among the tools and weapons of a people dependent on the acquisition of meat. Some of the various ‘scrapers’ of the Mousterian can readily be seen as tools used in the preparation of animal skins though microwear studies do not suggest that very many of them specifically were; the notched and denticulated pieces certainly look like woodworking and plant processing items. Points, side-scrapers (often called ‘racloirs’ after their French name) and notched/denticulated pieces, all made on flakes struck from cores of raw material, are the stock-in-trade of the Mousterian, but in different places and at different times other tool types feature in the assemblages of tools found together on Mousterian sites: there are sometimes small bifacially worked hand-axes not unlike the hand-axes of much earlier times found in Africa and Europe – apart from their size; there are occasionally backed knives, longer for their width than most Mousterian flakes, blunted along one edge to make them safe to hold; there are sometimes chisel-tipped burins, more common in the Upper Palaeolithic; there are scrapers in many forms and a few items definitely distinctive of certain geographical areas. There are also differences in techniques of manufacture, particularly with regard to the preparation of the lumps of flint from which the basic Mousterian flakes were to be struck, and differences too in the degree of ‘retouch’ employed to arrive at the various tool types. Thus any given layer of any given Mousterian site will not produce the same tools as are found in another layer and elsewhere – though it may only be a striking difference in percentages of types, rather than sheer presence or absence of certain forms, that encourages us to distinguish between one sort of Mousterian and another. What these different sorts of Mousterian mean has been the subject of debate; some have seen in them the products of different families or tribes, while others see only the results of special tool kits’ being run up for particular jobs by the same people in different circumstances, perhaps according to season, for example. The former is a ‘cultural’ interpretation, the latter a ‘functional’ one. Some extremists have even proposed that most of the variation among Mousterian assemblages arose out of constant reuse, damage, modification and retouching of a simple set of flake forms that all started life as pretty much the same all-purpose tool – the archaeologists simply finding them at various stages along the way to ultimate reduction to uselessness. Probably there is some truth in all these explanations of Mousterian variability but not as much in any single one of them as their proponents would like to think. The cultural explanation still holds water, if not as hermetically as some of its supporters have argued. It is hard to think that, say, five distinct cultural groups of Neanderthalers, each one staunchly committed to its particular line-up of tool types and tool percentages, came and went over tens of thousands of years in the relatively small area of south-west France, occupying the same sites by turns, without culturally coalescing and losing their particular identities. One or two of the five sorts of Mousterian that were proposed in France, defined more by the absence of distinctive forms than by any positive traits, are probably statistical constructs resulting from the lumping together of random occurrences of functionally limited assemblages, but when these are removed it is still possible to identify three different sorts of Mousterian in south-west France, in stratigraphical (i.e. chronological) relationships with each other. The la Ferrassie variant of the Mousterian, named after the place at which it was first identified, antedates the la Quina variant at a number of sites; both have high percentages of racloirs, with steep retouch, and slug-shaped double side-scrapers called ‘limaces’ as well as points, but in the earlier variety there is much more evidence of a particular preparatory technique called ‘Levallois’, after the Paris suburb where it was first noted on flakes and cores much older than the Mousterian. The Levallois method calls for the preliminary striking off of a number of large flakes from the lump of raw material to prepare its shape to the point where the final decisive blow will bring off the desired flake in one go, with only the need for finishing retouch thereafter. It is, from the point of view of human mental evolution, an interesting early technological invention since it requires even greater prevision of the finished product in the mind’s eye, and the intermediate steps necessary to achieve it, than does simply knapping away to produce the tool. The Levallois technique was first employed in Africa well over 200,000 years ago: perhaps it was reinvented in different places at later times, or the idea spread around the world to reach people like the ancestors of the Neanderthalers at about 200,000 BP. Whatever its merits
, the la Quina variant that followed on from the la Ferrassie exhibits much less in the way of Levallois technique. On some sites there is a steady loss of Levallois features rather than an abrupt changeover. These two Mousterian variants can be brought together under the name Charentian; they flourished, one after the other, up to about 60,000 BP. Very interestingly, it is with the Charentian Mousterian that many of the French finds of Neanderthal bones are associated, in company with faunal remains including many reindeer bones and witnessing to the coldness of the times. But at le Moustier, the youth’s skeleton was accompanied by a more weakly characterized Mousterian called, rather unsatisfactorily, Typical Mousterian, whose main feature is its low percentage of racloirs and absence of any distinct forms other than points: it may well be a statistically generated will-o’-the-wisp. Later than the two Charentian variants on many French sites comes a Mousterian with small hand-axes that seem to relate back to the Acheulian hand-axe culture of pre-Mousterian, pre-Neanderthal times. Where this Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MAT) is found it is either at the top of a Mousterian stratigraphy, above la Ferrassie and/or la Quina types, or directly beneath Upper Palaeolithic levels; radiocarbon dates of about 40,000 BP have been obtained for it, and its faunal associations are interstadially warm with red deer, aurochs and bison. It is characterized by its small heart-shaped axes (in addition to points, racloirs and denticulates), but itself comes in two varieties: an earlier one with more axes and racloirs and a later one with more blunt-backed knives. This latter sort of Mousterian looks forward to the very beginnings of the Upper Palaeolithic in an intriguing way, for it seems to be the basis of the Chatelperronian culture of south-west France and northern Spain that, before the l970s, people thought was simply the earliest of the Upper Palaeolithic manifestations, and therefore the work of Crô-Magnon Man – until a classic Neanderthal skeleton was found with it at Saint-Césaire! The Chatelperronian, whatever its origins, is not a mere Mousterian variant and its implications will be of great importance when we come to discuss the ultimate fate of the Neanderthal people.