Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  The marked slab that covered a Neanderthal child’s grave at la Ferrassie.

  At the eastern extremity of la Ferrassie, six more pits were located in a more irregular pattern with a possible burial in one of them and a certain one in another, of unique character. Here a child’s skeleton was found at one end of the pit, separated from its skull by about one metre. The skull was under a triangular slab of rock with a shallow concavity on its underside surrounded by further cup-like hollows in groups of two and four. If these markings on the slab were indeed of human origin, then their significance is quite unguessable now – all we can say is that they would definitely point to some mental symbolism on the part of the Neanderthalers who made this infant’s grave in the cemetery of la Ferrassie. The remaining feature of the site to be noted is the spread of limestone pieces, about 5 × 3 m in extent, that has been interpreted as the floor of some (tent-like?) shelter. Until we apply the brakes of caution, the whole scene at la Ferrassie can look like some family burial place, with poignant reminders of the toll of disease and deaths of children, complete with chapel of rest or shrine. Touching illustrations have been made to show a Neanderthal father (himself doomed) dropping a goodbye flint into the grave of one of his children, while mother and another child (also destined soon for the same cemetery) mourn beside him; it is not impossible that something like that happened at la Ferrassie some 70,000 years ago, but the nature of Neanderthal family life is not clear to us now (indeed it is not clear, as we have seen, that family life as we know it existed among the Neanderthalers) and any beliefs about life after death that these people may have entertained can only be a matter of conjecture for us. (The possibility must also be noted that the la Ferrassie burials are really the work of very late Neanderthalers of the proto-Upper Palaeolithic Chatelperronian culture, who dug the shallow graves into the Mousterian levels below their feet after 40,000 BP. There is no compelling reason to think that this was the case, but the possibility is there; it would not alter the fact that the la Ferrassie cemetery belonged to Neanderthalers but they would be late Neanderthalers possibly under Upper Palaeolithic influence.) La Ferrassie confirms that Neanderthal burial practice could on occasion go beyond mere disposal of the dead and that by itself is sufficient to establish the human likeness of the Neanderthalers in a manner not evidenced for any other sorts of fossil men before Homo sapiens sapiens of the Upper Palaeolithic with the exception of the also Mousterian early moderns of the Levant. If, as seems likely, the Neanderthal folk had not fully made the breakthrough into the modern sort of sentience that characterizes the complex mentality of the human race as we know it, then at least their awareness of death as evidenced by their many burials, seemingly much sharper than that of their evolutionary forebears, indicates a growing consciousness of the problematic status of humanity in the natural world that it tries to control. It has been suggested that their very success in exploiting the harsh world about them with better technology and better hunting methods than their predecessors’, however inferior to those of their successors, raised questions never asked before about the limits of human power, especially the ultimate limitation of death.

  There are besides deliberate burial, with or without symbolic features, some other areas of the archaeology of the Neanderthalers that might throw light on their possible mental habits. With shades of cannibalism, there are three instances where Neanderthal skulls seem not only to have been opened up to get at the brains but also to have been set up like cult items or trophies. Of course, the usual ambiguities in the evidence dog these cases just as they do in the question of grave goods. The most colourful of the finds, as far as interpretations go if not the hard facts, was made at Monte Circeo south of Rome in Italy, at a cave reputed to have been the very spot where Apollo’s daughter Circe turned the sailors of Odysseus into swine. At the back of the cave, a skull was found lying face down, as it seemed to its discoverers, in a circle of stones as though it had fallen off a long ago decayed stick. The skull proved to have received a blow to the temple sufficiently close in time to the death of its owner for healing not to have occurred to the bone; moreover the hole in the base of the skull – the foramen magnum – where the spine attaches and the nerves run out from the brain in the spinal cord was enlarged as though to get at the brain. Conjecture ran to the idea of ritual cannibalism followed by some sort of trophy cult with the skull set up on a pole in the centre of the ring of stones. There were bones of deer and aurochs around to suggest a ritual feast at the shrine. Sadly, it has to be recorded that the skull was found by workmen operating in near total darkness and subsequent investigation revealed no circle but only a wide scatter of stones with, at best, a hole where the skull had been lifted from among them. The blow to the temple might be real enough, but the enlargement of the foramen magnum could have been the work of animals like wolf or fox, as could the collection of animal bones. In the Far East, in Java, skulls broadly similar in type and age to those of the Neanderthalers (but not distinctively Neanderthal in type) were found in a condition that really does look like ritual treatment: not only are the foramina enlarged but the faces have been deliberately smashed off too. Nothing so clearly indicative of cultic practice exists in the Neanderthal evidence.

  The underside of the skull from Monte Circeo, with enlarged opening to the neck.

  But the case for cultic handling of certain animal bones by the Neanderthalers is perhaps stronger than that for their ritual treatment of human remains. And the animal in the case is the cave-bear, the extinct Ursus spelaeus, a creature more fearsome (at up to 2.75 m from nose to tail) in its time than the grizzly bear in ours. We recall that the bones of Neanderthal Man himself, in the Feldhof cave, were at first taken for those of a bear – for bear bones are rather commoner on the German, Swiss, Central European and Russian Mousterian sites than in the French (or Levantine) ones and can look surprisingly human (skulls apart) at first glance. The general up-rearing physical configuration of bears resembles the human frame and this, together with the unmatched ferocity of the threat they posed to human beings as contenders for cave habitation in wintertime, no doubt endowed them with a vivid impact on the minds of the Neanderthal folk. It may be that the comparative lack of carnivore rivals to humanity, especially of bears, in the caves of France and Israel accounts for the higher frequency with which fairly complete Neanderthal skeletons are found in these regions in contrast with Central European sites where human remains are sometimes more fragmentary, perhaps as much as a result of disturbance by bears (and wolves and hyenas) as of putative cannibalism. Bears, especially when digging winter dens for hibernation, were very likely to disturb human remains in caves. And living Neanderthalers must frequently have disputed the caves of Central Europe in particular, but of France too on occasions, with dangerous cave-bear foes. It would be small wonder if, like more recent hunting peoples from Lapland through Siberia to the Americas, the Neanderthalers were led to a cult of these potent beasts. The evidence that they were is not always as compelling as it has been made out to be, needless to say, but some of it is quite suggestive.

  The place for which the most elaborate claims have been made is high in the Swiss Alps, at 2,400 m: Drachenloch, not the erstwhile lair of dragons but most certainly of cave-bears. The bear bones were found just after the First World War in the innermost part of a cave system reported to show signs of Mousterian occupation just at the entrance. Between the second and third caves of the system (near the remains of a fire) a box-like arrangement of stones, about 1 m square, was found with a single slab over it like a cover. Inside the box, if that is what it was, were seven bear skulls with their muzzles reportedly facing the entrance of the cave. Two of the skulls had a few neck vertebrae in place, suggesting that they had gone into the box with their flesh in place, possibly having had their heads cut off soon after death. At the back of the third cave, between the cave wall and a line of stone blocks, six more bear skulls were discovered as though deliberately placed there and, in one case,
a bear femur was thrust through the arch of the cheekbone of a bear skull on top of two bear shin bones. These bones did not all belong to the same bear. A regular shrine to some Neanderthal bear cult could easily be pictured on the basis of these reported finds. But it might equally be the case that bears themselves, in the course of hollowing out new nests for hibernation, disturbed the remains of their own predecessors who had died in the Drachenloch and pushed them up to the cave wall and among the scatter of blocks fallen from the roof that overenthusiastic archaeologists interpreted as human constructions. No Mousterian artefacts have been found in direct association with such bear bone dispositions in Alpine caves, nor are the bones known to carry any cut marks indicative of human interference.

  Similar scepticism can be brought to bear, as it were, on other finds, like the one at Petershöhle in Bavaria, where bear skulls were found on a natural rock shelf in the cave, or the Slovenian site with four bear skulls apparently arranged in a circle with their snouts together. Selective collections of bear remains do look rather like deliberate human agency: at Wildenmannlisloch in Germany 310 bear canine teeth had been accumulated, while at les Furtins in France six bear skulls on limestone slabs were accompanied by a collection of long bones on another slab, but all such instances are open to explanations without human intervention and Mousterian associations are not always at all clear. It was inevitable that bear bones and human remains, tools or bones, would sometimes come to rest in the same caves, with or without any real relationship as a result of shared or disputed occupation let alone cultic practices.

  There were cave-bears in the French ice age too, if perhaps in smaller numbers than in Switzerland and Germany. Rouffignac, for example, shows the hollowed-out nests of hibernating bears and claw scratches on the walls. At Isturitz in the Pyrenees bear bones were found in alleged alignments. And one cave, quite close to the famous Upper Palaeolithic painted cave of Lascaux, affords the best evidence we have for Neanderthal cultic practice to do with bears. We have seen that this site, Regourdou, features a Neanderthal burial on a bed of stones covered over with a cairn containing an in-mixing of tools and animal bones, mostly of deer and brown bear, including a bear humerus. (All this in evidently warmish times.) Apparently dug earlier than the human grave was a stone-lined rectangular pit found to contain on excavation the remains of more than twenty bears (one complete save for its skull), under a slab weighing about a tonne. Bear bones, sometimes in heaps, were found elsewhere at the Regourdou site; if all these bones were not the natural remains of bears living at the site during periods without human occupation, then it is reasonable to imagine that the Neanderthalers were able to surprise some of them during hibernation and kill them if they were lucky – perhaps as a source of food in hard times but, in view of the grave-like stone-lined cist that seems indisputable at Regourdou, perhaps equally in connection with some real cult of the bear that may even have been widespread among Neanderthalers from France through Germany, Switzerland and Central Europe to Russia. Certainly the evidence of Regourdou serves to extend some benefit of the doubt to sites like Drachenloch. And if the Neanderthalers really were according some sort of ritual treatment to the bones or even dead bodies of bears, as they seemingly did on occasion with their own dead, then we are faced with some evidence of a symbolic capacity on their part, though we cannot know what precisely they meant by it. With the exception of la Ferrassie, it is difficult to make a case for their burials as much more than disposal of their dead; why they might have collected and arranged bear bones, even perhaps fleshed bear body parts, remains obscure.

  The establishment of the Upper Palaeolithic peoples who succeeded the Neanderthalers in Europe saw the flowering among them of the universal human inclination towards artistic creation. Lascaux, very close to Regourdou in location, is separated from it by perhaps 70,000 years in time and a vast gulf in the creative expression of human mental capacity. Virtually nothing at all that could be called art exists in Mousterian and Neanderthal contexts. Rather like the collection of bear teeth from Wildenmannlisloch, collections of quartz crystals and fossil shells have been reported at, for example, El Castillo in Spain, but collecting diverting or puzzling items is not art. Pieces of manganese dioxide and iron oxide (ochre when naturally mixed with clay), with their colouring possibilities, have been noted in a number of sites, sometimes showing signs of rounding or rubbing as a result of use, and possible grindstones for ochre have been identified at le Moustier and Pech de l’Azé. But ochre pieces do not seem to have been burned to increase their colour range. The colouring of bits of stone and even animal bone is just about attested, but there are no designs or patterns let alone drawings and no evidence is available, of course, that hides of animals (as clothes or shelters) or skins of human beings were coloured, though both cases are possible. The evidence for any sort of Neanderthal artistic production, however rudimentary, is pitifully thin when compared with the creations of the Upper Palaeolithic people and really no advance on anything from older contexts than that of the Neanderthalers.

  The closest approach to some sort of symbolic design would appear to be the cup marks on the underside of the slab over the infant’s grave of la Ferrassie, though their meaning is impossible to guess. One of the other graves on the same site yielded an animal bone with fine parallel lines engraved on it, and other examples of a similar sort come from sites in the Crimea, the Spanish Basque Country and other sites in France. The trouble with finds of this sort is that any notion of pattern-making is hard to distinguish from random marks left by sharp stone tools in the course of butchery or cutting up some other material resting on the bone. Perhaps the zigzag line on a late Mousterian bone piece (after 50,000 BP) from Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria looks a little more intentional and the long parallel lines on a bovid shoulder blade from la Quina are pretty convincing, too, as far as they go – but may have come from Upper Palaeolithic levels of the site. Some cases of perforations in bones are recorded, but carnivore canines may have been responsible for some of these, or chemical action on the bone. There is a Mousterian bone fragment from Pech de l’Azé with a hole in it, and a reindeer phalange (toe bone) and fox canine from la Quina were perforated in some way (though the hole in the fox canine looks as though it was rather given up on before completion). And even if the swan vertebra and wolf metapodial (foot bone) from Bocksteinschmiede in Germany, of about 110,000 BP, are genuine Mousterian items with man-made holes in them, they might be seen as utilitarian toggles (interesting in themselves for that reason) rather than decorative objects. What do look like truly decorative pieces, in the shape of grooved wolf and fox canine pendants plus a holed bone fragment and holed and grooved shells, found in association with a Neanderthal burial at Arcy-sur-Cure in France, turn out in fact to belong to that enigmatic Chatelperronian phase of the Upper Palaeolithic, in which a blade tool tradition with part origin in the late Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition was being employed by the last of the Neanderthalers at a time after 40,000 BP when the truly Upper Palaeolithic culture of the Aurignacians (made by modern Homo sapiens) had already entered the region. So, just as the tools of the Chatelperronians were quite likely influenced by the Aurignacians, so we are entitled to believe that the decorative items on the Arcy site were also derived from Aurignacian example (as perhaps also were the two huts evidenced there).

  Possibly non-utilitarian markings on pieces from Mousterian sites: Abri Souard above, Quneitra below.

  Among the remaining candidates for artistic status among the products found on Mousterian sites are: a circular sandstone pebble from Axlor in the Basque Country with a central groove and two cupule hollows; some grooved bear teeth from Belgium; lined bone fragments from Molodova in the Ukraine; a number of perforated bones, a horse canine with parallel lines and a saiga antelope phalange with a fan of lines from the Crimea; pebbles and flakes of flint from RiparoTagliente in Italy with engraved lines, including a double arc; a similar piece from Quneitra in Israel with straight lines and concentric sem
icircles; and a nummulite fossil from Tata in Hungary on which a natural crack has been augmented with a straight incision at right angles to form a cross. Even if we allow for neglect by archaeologists who have not expected to find any sort of art in Mousterian contexts and have not looked hard for it, and if we credit the available evidence beyond its deserts, all this constitutes a meagre haul of potentially symbolic creation on the part of the Neanderthalers – a situation that has a bearing on discussion of Neanderthal mental capacities.

  It has been said of the Neanderthalers in the light of what they left behind them (and what they did not leave) that it looks as though they lived every day like the first day of their lives, with everything on a short-term basis. Their own bones are thick from heavy labour, as if they lacked the wit to make life easy on themselves; their home sites show a low level of organization; their tools are limited in range of types and found without much cultural variation over huge areas like those of their predecessors (and quite unlike those of their successors); they got their food, like their raw materials, opportunistically and stored none of it against a snowy day; they buried their dead on occasions, but without the clear ritual element of later people; they followed no religion that we can see except perhaps for some awe of bears; they produced, to all intents and purposes, no art whatsoever and wore no personal decoration (unless it was colouring of clothes and skin) to mark any complexity in their social relations; a cloud hangs over the very humanity, as we apprehend it, of their sexual and family arrangements. Despite their large brains, they were in some respects more like all their primitive forebears and indeed the ape-like ancestors of the human line than they were like us. But then, the same could be said of the early modern representatives of Homo sapiens that were their contemporaries in Africa and the Levant. They were even more like us than the Neanderthalers were in skull shape and postcranial physique, but they made the same Mousterian tools and left nothing behind them for a long time to prefigure the achievement of their Upper Palaeolithic descendants and ourselves. In the latter part of this book we will discuss the factors that have been proposed to propel humanity into the veritable explosion of technological innovation, art and religion that characterizes the Upper Palaeolithic and most of subsequent human history. Language must play some part, whether more as effect than cause or cause than effect, on the evolution of modern human behaviour; suffice it for the moment to note that Neanderthal language (on the current assumption that they were physically capable of it) may well have been limited in vocabulary and grammar, very likely without tenses to remember the past and conjecture the future in keeping with an immediacy of all sensations and lack of introspection about abstract notions. Like children and pidgin speakers, the Neanderthalers probably used language only for the here and now. The near total lack of symbolism seen in all the products of the Neanderthalers and the fixity and limitedness of their stone technology argue against the possibility that they were wielding a complex language with high symbolic content and variety of expression. It is possible, as we shall have reason to discuss later on, that Neanderthal language was restricted to social exchanges with little scope for objective handling of the details of the world at large, let alone for abstract thought and expression. Again, this was probably the state of affairs with the early moderns too: many researchers assume that, all the same, there was something about them that could lead on to enhanced humanity – something which the Neanderthalers lacked. The case of the Chatelperronian, on this view, is seen as a groping acculturation of some late Neanderthal folk towards some elements of the Upper Palaeolithic package: a few new tools, a bit of personal decoration, enough to hold their own for a while, perhaps, but in the end not up to scratch, leaving the Neanderthalers if not to extermination at the hands of the Aurignacians then to the fate of being simply out-competed and terminally marginalized. Some workers believe that the Neanderthal people, or some of them at least, never came to such a sorry pass and were as able as their contemporaries to evolve both culturally and even physically into modern types, or to interbreed with incoming moderns till most of their distinctive traits were lost. (Some people think the Neanderthalers might have invented the Chatelperronian all by themselves, without influence from the Aurignacians.) It is these interpretations of the Neanderthal career that have suffered a setback with the progress of genetic studies on human evolution in general and the study of Neanderthal mtDNA in particular. Perhaps more interesting in the long run is the problem set by the discovery of big-brained human beings, whether Neanderthal or early modern, who went for so long (perhaps forever in the Neanderthal case) without improving themselves one whit that we can see in the archaeological record, without developing complex language, symbolism, personal decoration, art, religion, ever-advancing technology with cultural and stylistic variety. And then, all of a sudden as it looks with hindsight, some of them did achieve all these things, without appearing to undergo any further physical evolution. We will return to this problem at the end of the book. For now, in order to build up a picture of human evolution as a whole, to see the trends that eventually issued in modern Homo sapiens and all his wily ways, we need to push back beyond Neanderthal Man into the common evolution of all mankind, starting for the sake of our central subject with the immediate background to the Neanderthalers and their Mousterian culture.