Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  Mousterian stone tools.

  The remaining variety of the Mousterian, according to French classification, is the Denticulate, marked out not so much by its notched and tooth-edged pieces as by its generally mediocre character with the near absence of most distinctive tool types like axes, back knives, even racloirs and points. It is easy to see in this a functional aspect, perhaps along seasonal woodworking lines, with no cultural suggestions about it (though what racloirs there are do differ from those of other Mousterian assemblages). The Denticulate and the Typical Mousterian have no clear chronological positions in Mousterian stratigraphies, though the Typical is pretty well confined to the early phase of the Last Glaciation, with the Denticulate cropping up within the Typical and then again at the end of the la Quina.

  Some of the Mousterian variants identified in France do occur elsewhere – the MAT and the la Quina, for example, in Belgium – but the chronological scheme from la Ferrassie through la Quina with MAT at the end has not so far been demonstrated outside France. In the wider world of the Neanderthalers, across Europe to Western Asia with the Levant, the Mousterian shows considerable variation. Flint itself, taken from chalk cliffs and river beds, can be of variable quality and in some places only inferior stones were available, limiting the technological expression of toolmaking. Different regions promoted different ways of life, and climatic changes through the long career of the Neanderthalers demanded changes in their behaviour; no doubt there were random ‘cultural’ variations too in different times and places. So there is variety within the Mousterian throughout its range, but – even when the complexities of the French sequence are taken into account – it is worth noting that neither geographically nor chronologically does the Mousterian exhibit the rich variability and innovativeness of the Upper Palaeolithic cultures that succeeded it, with their much more rapid turnover of styles with strong local flavours. It is apparent that with the Mousterian (and its world contemporaries and predecessors) we are facing a different sort of cultural situation from that of the Upper Palaeolithic and all the productions of modern Homo sapiens sapiens ever since. In Central and Eastern Europe the local Mousterians often show small and spindly pointed axes and bifacially worked leaf-shaped points. In Russia there are bifacial knives, while in north-west Greece large blade-like flakes appear at about 80,000 BP and are then superseded by levels with very small scrapers made on flakes. A Mousterian of sorts has been identified even as far east as Afghanistan, but there is nothing distinctly Mousterian in India and Pakistan, and certainly not in China. The Levantine Mousterian does show a similar range of tool types to France’s, with something very like the Charentian facies, sometimes with small axes too. The Amudian, seen among other places at the same site as the Neanderthal skeletal remains discussed in Chapter 3, is a Mousterian richer than most in blades, backed knives, end-scrapers and chisel-tipped burins (all rather Upper Palaeolithic elements in Europe). Levallois technique tends to be common in the Near Eastern Mousterian, among whose latest manifestations are the bifacially thinned Levallois points of the Emiran which were very probably hafted on to shafts. In the Negev there are hints of technological progress from Levallois points to true blades of Upper Palaeolithic type after about 50,000 BP. The Mousterian of Shanidar in Iraq is less Levallois in character, probably because raw material here came in smaller pieces that did not lend themselves to the expensive preparatory work of the technique. It is worth noting at this point that in the Near East, the elsewhere quite strict linkage between the Mousterian and the Neanderthal physical type breaks down, for the Mousterian stoneworking tradition is also associated with very much more modern human types at sites like Skhul and Qafzeh as well as appearing with Neanderthalers at Amud, Kebara, Tabun and Shanidar; moreover dating methods applied at these sites strongly suggest that, for example, the Qafzeh moderns at about 90,000 BP predate the Kebara Neanderthalers by tens of thousands of years, though the Tabun Neanderthal woman might be at least as old as the Qafzeh moderns. This complex and puzzling situation is one of the keys to the questions of modern human origins that we shall discuss later in this book. Along the coast of North Africa there is a Levallois sort of Mousterian (with neatly stemmed or tanged pieces) and a hint in places of influence from the Spanish Mousterian – remember the Neanderthal discoveries on the Rock of Gibraltar. In sub-Saharan Africa something essentially akin to the Eurasian Mousterian, in being based on medium-sized flakes struck from cores of raw material, is widely encountered, with about the same date range. Made on poorer quality raw material, often quartzite, the African equivalent of the Mousterian shows Levallois technique but lighter retouch in general, with fewer of the distinctive racloirs of the European Mousterian. In Africa this sort of thing is called Middle Stone Age rather than Mousterian, but both manifestations are so fundamentally alike, as representing a broad stage in the development of stone technology, that they can be lumped together and conveniently called Middle Palaeolithic. Thus they find their place between the earlier Lower Palaeolithic (called Early Stone Age in Africa) of big axes and crude flakes and the later Upper Palaeolithic (African Late Stone Age) of smaller stone products including blades as well as bone tools and weapons of all-round sophistication. It is rather like the situation with human fossils: there are African contemporaries and rough equivalents of the Neanderthalers but, if the word Neanderthal is to carry any strictly distinct meaning, then there are no Neanderthal types in Africa (or in the Far East, either). The Neanderthal people and the Mousterian culture with which they are so almost entirely associated are not African phenomena, but they do belong to roughly the same stages of human evolution and development of stone technology as their African contemporaries.

  The Middle Palaeolithic to which the Mousterian culture belongs does show an advance over the Lower Palaeolithic in terms of efficient exploitation of raw material if not altogether in eye-catching sophistication of tool types and innovatory turnover. Middle Palaeolithic technology was securing more cutting edge per bulk of raw material than the Lower Palaeolithic did. More flakes with more useful edges were produced by Middle Palaeolithic techniques and styles than by Lower Palaeolithic ones – but to nothing like the extent of Upper Palaeolithic styles and techniques, where the reliable manufacture of long straight-edged blades had been perfected. The Upper Palaeolithic technology embraced, moreover, the extensive use of bone and antler in the fashioning of very sophisticated items like barbed harpoons and, ultimately, needles.

  Bone items of manufacture have rarely been found in Mousterian contexts, partly (but not wholly) because they were not expected or looked for very carefully in the earlier excavations. Modern excavation techniques would certainly reveal them if they were there. In Mousterian levels on two Spanish sites large numbers of animal bone pieces have been found that resemble some of the stone tools of the time: denticulate, notched and scraper-like pieces, along with bone hammers and punches. It has to be said that it can be hard to distinguish some of these from the products of animal activity in chewing and crunching bones, but there do appear to be signs of percussion flaking on some animal long bones of the same sort as was used to flake stone. Elsewhere animal bones in Mousterian contexts quite often carry cut marks made by stone tools in the course of butchery and food preparation, so one might think that the idea of working bone would have occurred to the Neanderthalers more often than it seems to have done. It is as though their minds were rather rigidly programmed for certain accomplishments, like stone and presumably woodwork, and often unable to make the connective leap across the boundaries of mental domains to link up the idea, say, of animal bones with the idea of toolmaking. We shall return to the matter of Neanderthal mentality in the next chapter. Whatever their limitations, they did produce a few bone items that have come down to us, including a bone point at Combe Grenal in France and points made on mammoth rib at Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in Germany. The latter site also produced the antler club mentioned earlier and one well-made barbed point of mammoth bone, a significant find fo
r its time. With one spectacular exception, barbed points and harpoons have only otherwise been found in Upper Palaeolithic contexts, to which it is easy to think they naturally belong in their sophistication of forethought and execution. That exception is an important, if contentious, piece of evidence for the evolution of modern mankind in Africa and we shall look into it in Chapter 12.

  In contrast to the paucity of bone manufactures on Mousterian sites, all the signs are that wood played a considerable part in Neanderthal technology. We simply cannot expect many wooden items to have survived from Neanderthal times, but there is the evidence of the microwear on Mousterian flints, which points above all to their use in woodworking. There is the post hole at Combe Grenal and the hut emplacements from various sites that necessitate the idea of trimmed poles in the construction of shelters. From Lehringen in Germany comes a yew wood spear, 2.4 m long, which might have had a fire-hardened tip and was found in the ribs of an elephant of Last Interglacial times (about 130,000 BP), bolstering not only the case for Neanderthal woodworking but also for Neanderthal big game hunting, about which some archaeologists have been sceptical. In fact, even older wooden spears are known: the sharpened front portion of a spear was found at Clacton in Essex in 1911, dating back to about 450,000 BP, but sometimes reinterpreted as a digging stick; recently three very well-made throwing spears, heavier at the tip (which was formed from the denser and harder root end of the wood) and tapered to the back, were found in a German coal mine and dated to about 400,000 BP. These and the Clacton spear well predate the appearance of Neanderthal Man and show that woodworking and ambitious hunting were established accomplishments long before the arrival of big-brained people like Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens.