by Paul Jordan
Wood spear tip from Clacton.
The thinned butts of some of the Mousterian points and bifacials suggest that the Neanderthalers could wield wooden spears with sharp flint tips and it may be that Neanderthal hunting habits made more use of spearing than had been seen in the world before. A Levallois point was found in a mammoth skeleton at Hounslow in England. The Mousterian tool and weapon kit may not look so much more sophisticated than the Lower Palaeolithic one does in terms of workmanship, style and standardization, but it helped the Neanderthalers to extend the range of humanity beyond the borders of the old Lower Palaeolithic world, on to the North European Plain and into Eastern Europe and Western Asia where the Lower Palaeolithic people had not gone, and to hang on there in climatic circumstances of the harshest kind. (The Upper Palaeolithic people did better still, as we shall see, penetrating Siberia and reaching the Americas, and occupying Australia.) Population numbers among Neanderthal groups all over their range can never have been large, even in the favourable environment of south-west Europe (though they were evidently up on Lower Palaeolithic numbers), and their environment was often hostile and changeable; they must meet their circumstances with a limited Middle Palaeolithic technology with which there was only a limited number of things that could be done (which is one reason why a basically similar range of tool types shows up all over the Mousterian range, in contrast with the flexibility of the Upper Palaeolithic). For all that, through two major climatic phases and many more minor, the Neanderthal people endured for 80,000 years or so from Spain to Uzbekistan with a way of life that harked back in most respects to the long past history of evolving mankind but looked forward in just a few intriguing ways to the future of humanity.
The Neanderthal Way of Life
Next to the flint tools left behind in the places occupied by the Neanderthalers, it is the bones of wild animals – the faunal remains, as archaeologists call them – that are the most obvious features of Mousterian sites. We have seen that the faunal evidence can tell us about the climate of the times in which particular levels of particular sites were accumulated – reindeer bones, for example, from very cold periods, red deer from warmer ones; the faunal remains also tell us, of course, something about the subsistence of those times – what animals or parts of animals were brought to their sites by the Neanderthal folk, what age those animals were, perhaps on occasions whether they were hunted or scavenged. Plant remains, particularly pollen grains, can also tell us much about climatic conditions, but direct evidence as to plant food – highly perishable or wholly consumed without residue – is hard to come by. In general, it is likely that in most times and places (especially in the cold periods) the Neanderthal people relied more on meat than plant food, but for all that vegetable matter must have been of some importance to them and sometimes, perhaps, the main part of their diet. It has been suggested, for example, on the basis of pollen traces on some of the simpler (but abundant) types of flint tools, that at Combe Grenal the staple foodstuff of the Neanderthal inhabitants might have been aquatic plants from the stream below the site! At Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar there were found charred pine cones in the Mousterian levels, but these may have been used as fuel for the fire; a Spanish site near Barcelona did yield carbonized seeds of sea-beet and wild vetch, while the Kebara site in Israel showed burnt peas among its ash deposits.
But the evidence for plant food on Mousterian sites is thin and, for the most part, it was clearly meat of some sort that kept the Neanderthalers going in their hardworking way of life. As with their largely local acquisition of stone, the Neanderthal people appear not to have gone far for their meat, exploiting the fauna to hand, which varied from place to place and time to time. Whatever was around in the largest numbers and was easiest to acquire is what we find in the debris of the Neanderthalers’ sites. The question is, whether they came by their meat mostly by hunting or by scavenging. People with a poor opinion of the Neanderthalers’ capabilities (in which they may be justified) vis-à-vis our own and those of our Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, play down Neanderthal hunting prowess and credit them with frequent recourse to scavenging of animals that had died of natural causes or been brought down by various carnivorous rivals of humanity. Scavenging is not in general a good strategy for human beings and is avoided as far as possible by foraging peoples in the world today, certainly in warm climes where bacteria see to it with quickly generated toxins that dead meat belongs as much as possible to them rather than appealing to scavengers. Even so, creatures like the hyena and vulture have made a career out of the scavenging way of life. And in the cold world of the Neanderthalers of the last ice age, scavenging may well have been an attractive proposition, equipped as they were with fire to thaw out frozen carcasses and sharp (and if necessary heavy) tools to break them up – things that none of their animal competitors could do.
The marks of scavenging animals’ teeth and/or humans’ flint tools can help to decide whether hunting and butchery, or intervention at scavenging sites, or just the activity of hunting and scavenging carnivores accounts for the animal bones found in the occupation layers of caves and among the debris of sites in the open. The nature of the bones themselves, the species, sexes, ages and parts in question, also contribute to the assessment. There seems no doubt that the Neanderthalers did hunt in some circumstances, on a large scale and successfully. Cave levels at Combe Grenal accumulated during the second cold phase of the Last Glaciation, after about 80,000 BP, show many bones belonging to the main meaty part of reindeer – the top parts of the legs in particular – and relatively few from the less rewarding parts in terms of meat yield, like lower limbs and heads. It looks as though young and female or sickly reindeer were being killed on the calving grounds in late spring and early summer, probably with the sort of thrusting spears we know to have been developed by this time. This may not have been exactly the thrill of the chase with long-range weapons but it is a step, at least, in the direction of real hunting. (The spear-thrower and the bow were not to be invented till long after Neanderthal times.) On the other hand, the predominance of horse heads and jaws in most levels of the Combe Grenal sequence has been interpreted to represent the human scavenging of horse parts that the carnivore killers of these animals had left behind after feasting on the meatier portions. In this picture, the Neanderthalers would have brought back to their caves the only horse meat they could come by – the unrewarding heads; but it might equally be that they dealt with the meat-rich portions like the upper legs swiftly and efficiently out in the wilds, bringing the good meat back off the bone and the heads to toy with at their leisure. It is not so clear, either, whether red deer were hunted as opposed to scavenged in the first and less severe cold phase of the last ice age, since upper limb bones are relatively lacking from these levels of Combe Grenal; but horses probably were hunted during that early part of the Last Glaciation, to go by the greater frequency in those same levels of their upper leg bones, which moreover do not display heavy cut marks caused by the dismembering of dried or frozen carcasses with flint tools. It is worth noting that Mousterian sites like Combe Grenal do not show faunal remains in great abundance when we take into account the great duration of occupation at some of them (Combe Grenal covers some 75,000 years) and the large numbers of flint tools they yield. At the sites of recent and modern foraging peoples, animal bones usually greatly outnumber abandoned tools, but at Combe Grenal over 17,000 stone tools are matched by fewer than 7,000 bone fragments which have been deemed to add up to no more than about 125 reindeer, 90 red deer, 70 horses and 20 bovids (aurochs, bison, etc.). This situation suggests several lines of interpretation, not mutually exclusive: populations of Neanderthalers must always have been very small (even in relatively comfortable areas like south-west France); Neanderthal folk may have been prone to live for the day, indeed cut out by Nature for nothing else, casually discarding their tools without a thought for the morrow; their diets must always have been poor and plant food must sometimes have been more important
than the evidence can now indicate; meat may have been largely consumed away from ‘home’ (by hunting males?) and only a small proportion of it brought back on the bone (for the women and children, otherwise faring meagrely?). In all the Combe Grenal sequence only one salmon vertebra was found: a rich and handy source of food in the river below the site was being ignored by these Mousterians, presumably because they could not exploit it on account of technological and intellectual shortcomings on their part. No fish-hooks, gorges, harpoons or pronged points have ever been found among the generally rather paltry bone products of the Neanderthalers. But fish bones are sometimes found on other Mousterian sites, of trout, carp, tench and eel. At Mousterian sites on Gibraltar mollusc shells have been found in accumulations that may be the result of Neanderthal activity and, in one case, it has been suggested that mussels were lightly cooked in hot ashes to open their shells. The bones of marine birds were also found in Mousterian contexts on Gibraltar, while partridge and pigeon bones have been found at French sites. At the site near Barcelona rabbit bones were numerous. But on the whole the remains of prey best taken in snares and traps are lacking on Mousterian sites, a situation which suggests that devices like sapling springs or running nooses (which would not survive in the archaeological record in any case) were not employed by the Neanderthalers. Finds of bird and small animal remains may well represent the rival activities of the carnivores (like foxes, wolves, hyenas, even cave-bears and lions) with whom the Neanderthal folk shared, or more likely disputed their caves and rock shelters. The bones of these carnivores themselves are rare in Mousterian contexts, for obvious reasons.
In some instances, the hunting capacity of the Neanderthal people is not in doubt. There are open-air sites where more than 90 per cent of the animal bones belong to one species, like aurochs or bison, found in association with denticulate flints and heavier chopping tools in a way that strongly suggests the conduct of specialized butchery procedures at kill-sites. Other sites with indications of heavy specialization in certain species of prey include Mauran in the Pyrenees with bison, Vogelherd in Germany with horses, Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan with mountain goats, though one must always remember that in some cases it may have been a matter of limited choice of quarry. At some sites there is evidence of mass slaughter by driving herds of animals over cliffs. At la Quina horse, reindeer and bovid bones were accumulated at the foot of the limestone cliff, while the Cotte de St Brelade site on Jersey shows that woolly rhino and mammoth were driven to their deaths on occasion, clearly in herds with no selection for age or sex. (From this site, too, comes evidence of damage at the tips of Mousterian flint points consistent with their use on the end of thrusting spears.) Massive animals like the mammoth and woolly rhino were no doubt welcome sources of food at times, but their huge bones could also be used for constructional purposes, as we saw at Molodova in the Ukraine (and even for fuel to burn). The commonly consumed animals like reindeer, red deer, horses and bovids also provided materials as well as food, particularly in the form of hides for the clothing the Neanderthalers must have worn, however untailored that was in the absence of bone needles.
An opportunistic mixture of hunting and scavenging was probably the usual way of the Neanderthalers. In Italy one can find a site that shows only horse heads and hooves and can be interpreted as evidence of scavenging, and another site where more complete remains of red and fallow deer suggest hunting as such. To want the unrewarding heads at all only serves to emphasize the potential hardships of Neanderthal life. Interestingly, the site with the fuller animal remains showed many small sharp flints with fresh edges to butcher the hunted meat while the site with the poorer pieces of meat showed flints that had been subjected to more retouch and were often heavier, to work on the scavenged material and perhaps on a greater quantity of plant food to supplement the meagre meat ration.
It is possible to speculate about sexual division of labour among the Neanderthalers, with implications for their social arrangements in general, on the basis of the tool types and faunal remains found in different parts of Mousterian sites or on different sites. It has been noted that, at Combe Grenal, the simple denticulate tools are not only made on locally acquired flints but also found around the big hearths inside the cave in association with paltry faunal remains, while the more complicatedly flaked or retouched points and butchery tools are made on flint fetched from further away and are found closer to the cave mouth, away from the main fires (though there are smaller ones) and in association with more in the way of meat-bearing bones. In all this, it is possible to see a picture of women and children around the cave fire preparing plant food and animal scraps with their simple tools, and of men dropping by with proper cuts of meat acquired by hunting with their thrusting spears tipped with Mousterian points. The males, moreover, may have often eaten much of their meat out in the wilds and not brought so much back with them to share out when they looked in at ‘home’. In this view, of course, it would not really be appropriate to speak of ‘home’ as we know it, for family life, with nuclear families and extended kinship relations reaching out into the wider world, would not have existed for the Neanderthalers. It would have been a world of small groups in which males and females lived largely separate lives, spread thinly across the Neanderthal world with individuals rarely travelling far from base and interacting very little with individuals from other groups. With no sort of even semi-permanent mating arrangements, there would have been no in-laws, no marrying into other groups, no larger society, no alliances, no help from distant relatives when it might be needed. In keeping with this picture, the Neanderthal women would have understandably remained rather robust specimens, used to looking out for themselves and their offspring, more like their males than the women of Homo sapiens sapiens are: an important area of sexual dimorphism would have been much less marked with them than it is with us – as their fossil bones attest. Sex might have been a less prominent, certainly less routine, aspect of Neanderthal life and some people have speculated that the concealed ovulation of modern Homo sapiens sapiens females might not have evolved in the Neanderthalers. Concealed ovulation does away with the phenomenon of signalized fertility at narrowly focused times, when male competition for females can reach dangerous proportions in a fashion inimical to monogamous mating; it also means that females do not themselves know when they are at their most fertile, and so remain receptive to sex for more of the time, enhancing the capacity of regular sex to cement monogamous relationships. Among the living primates, it is human beings only who have pair-based sexual relations at all times, and only human males provision their families of wives and offspring on a regular basis – indeed, husbands and wives and families constitute a purely human situation. It is possible to see in meat sharing by hunting males with ‘wives’ at ‘home’ a fundamental condition of family life and all that grows out of it in terms of social complexity and cohesion: it has been rather directly called the ‘sex-for-meat’ contract. If Neanderthal life really did not include features like regular more or less monogamous matings, meat sharing with wives and children and relatives, ‘home life’ (even if mobile), ‘marriage’ into other groups, larger social groupings and webs of kinship and lineage, then the Neanderthalers would indeed be much closer to our ape ancestors (who also, like the living apes, can have had none of these things) than to us in terms of behaviour, if not in terms of general physique and brain size. Everything about the life of the Upper Palaeolithic successors of the Neanderthalers (as indicated by the archaeology of their tools, shelters, food detritus, demography, burials and art) demonstrates their affinity with recent and modern foraging peoples in displaying evidence of the distinctly human traits we have been discussing. How far the Neanderthalers and other and older precursors of modern humanity exhibited these traits (and, to the extent that they did not, why they didn’t) is a question close to the entire problem of modern human origins, involving issues of language, mental organization and sentience that we shall try to explore towards the end of
this book.
All we have to go on in attempting to assess the likelihood of such and such behavioural traits in the remote past is the archaeology of the material remains left behind by long dead individuals, with all the effects of selective survival and discovery involved. We have seen that the evidence surviving from Neanderthal times can be used to paint broad pictures of speculative sexual and social relations, to the detriment by our standards of their status as fully human beings. But, useful and suggestive as these pictures can be, we have to recognize that they are based on pretty exiguous data where, often, only a matter of relative percentages of types of tools or faunal remains in incompletely known spatial relations nudges speculation one way or another. (Most stone artefacts, it is worth remembering, were probably quickly made, general-purpose tools – as they have been among recent ‘Stone Age’ peoples.) The associations of simple tools with bits of bone poor in meat by the main fireside and better tools with meat-rich bones at the cave mouth at Combe Grenal might only be the evidence of sensible domestic demarcations among a group actually living together on a permanent basis with no implications about mating patterns or wider society. There are open-air sites where the simple tools that have been attributed to women’s work at Combe Grenal have been found among what is apparently the men’s work of butchery; children’s remains have been found on these ‘male preserves’ too. It seems likely, in any case, that the sheer hardship of life in the last ice age, with its emphasis on the need to secure nourishing and energizing meat, would have prompted the organization of male hunting (or intensively scavenging) bands that retained their attachment to their females and offspring. And some evidence certainly seems to go against the resolutely subhuman characterization of the Neanderthalers reviewed above. There is the strong suggestion of care and concern carried by the crippled skeletons from, for example, la Chapelle and Shanidar – individuals who could not have survived their wounds and diseases as far as they did without provisioning by their fellows. Perhaps their survival can be attributed relatively more to toleration than to active concern, for poorly individuals can scrape along even among chimpanzee groups, but still tropical Africa is not the northern ice age and it is difficult to see the old man from la Chapelle as anything but a real charity case. On the other hand, the almost total lack of anything suggestive of personal decoration among Mousterian remains does argue against social complexity, for the wearing of decorative distinctions is a mark of complex social relations among modern human beings.