Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  The adult male Skhul V: rugged but non-Neanderthal, despite the heavy brow-ridges.

  Skhul V from the back, with a modern sort of breadth and height, giving the ‘tin loaf’ look.

  At both the Skhul and Qafzeh sites some ten to twenty individuals were discovered, having been buried (some of them, at least) in deliberately cut graves, with both sexes and adults and children in evidence. The Levantine graves in themselves (like the hearths of the sites) cannot be distinguished in sophistication between the Neanderthalers and the moderns, any more than real differences can be detected in the Mousterian tools found in association with both types. But where the question of grave goods is concerned, there seems no doubt that the moderns were sometimes furnishing their graves with provisions of an ideological intent. We have seen that Neanderthal graves in Europe and in Western Asia cannot unequivocally be said to offer evidence of grave goods in the form of tools or cuts of meat (or garlands of flowers); some of the Mount Carmel graves of modern human types do appear really to have contained animal parts that were intentionally buried with the dead. Skhul 5, for example (a man of between 30 and 40 years of age), lay on his back with the jawbone of a wild boar in his arms. Qafzeh 11 (a child) was buried with the skull and antlers of a deer. (The young female adult Qafzeh 9 was accompanied with the body of a six-year-old child by the feet.) There are associations of ochre and marine shells with the Skhul and Qafzeh graves. These Levantine burials with grave goods, at some 100,000 BP, possibly antedate most if not all of the Neanderthal burials of Europe and Western Asia, though the Teshik Tash Neanderthal boy is probably older – with or without the contentious goat horn arrangement around his skeleton. Certainly the provision of grave goods for some of the Levantine moderns, in a way seen not nearly so clearly at any Neanderthal burial, hints at the development of some differences in the mental sphere between the two groups of people, with the possibility that these early moderns felt a more conscious awareness of death and were truly capable of the symbolic business of making some provision for the dead in an imagined afterlife. (One of the Skhul males, incidentally, evidently died of a severe spear wound to the hip.)

  About the only other way in which any distinction can be made between the ways of life of the Levantine moderns and Neanderthalers arises out of some indication, derived from studies of animal teeth on their sites, that the Neanderthalers of Kebara hunted their prey all the year round while the Qafzeh moderns took theirs only in summer; it is as though the Neanderthalers had to work hard all the year round to stay put in their Mount Carmel caves while their modern predecessors came and went more insouciantly, used to travelling around and hunting more confidently. (Later on, Upper Palaeolithic blade industries, with their much greater economy of stone use to produce their more efficient tools, made the peripatetic lifestyle even easier to pursue.) Set against the uniformity of their Mousterian tool kits and their shared lack of bone work, of ornament, and of art, it would perhaps be rather clutching at straws to make very much of the few grave goods of the moderns and their putative hunting superiority to try to draw distinctions between them and the Neanderthalers who came after them in the Levant. But in the end it was the moderns who were to prosper on Earth and the Neanderthalers who were one way or another to disappear; the first hints of the survival advantages enjoyed by the moderns over the Neanderthalers are likely to lie in just such tiny indications of behavioural difference as a piece of meat in a grave or a novel hunting strategy. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the basically Middle Palaeolithic way of life that was shared by the Neanderthalers and these early moderns of Israel went on for tens of thousands of years thereafter with little or no innovation that we can see despite this emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens by about 100,000–90,000 BP. It is a good question to ask why it took so long for the moderns to do anything better with those big and thoroughly modern-looking brain-cases of theirs – a question to which we shall return.

  A tentative scheme for the comings and goings of evolving humanity in northern Israel from some time back into the Last Interglacial until about 40,000 BP can be constructed as follows. We recall the skull fragment from Zuttiyeh that, back in the 1920s, was the first of the Neanderthal-like remains to be discovered in the region; some anthropologists see in its rather domed forehead and lack of swept-back Neanderthal cheeks, despite the strong and divided brow-ridge configuration, a late and evolved sort of Homo erectus or heidelbergensis, perhaps on the way to the Neanderthalers or perhaps only representative of the African tendency towards early Homo sapiens already seen at Bodo and Kabwe. It is perhaps best to leave the Tabun Neanderthal woman out of the picture as being of slightly dubious provenance in the c. 100,000 BP levels to which she has been assigned. The Skhul and Qafzeh remains next appear as early examples, at about 100,000 BP, of almost completely evolved moderns, with strong indications of a heavy dose of African genetic inheritance in their general physiques, as though – plausibly – some good part of their ancestry had come up into the Levant from the East African region during relatively warm times at the end of the Last Interglacial when their African body pattern could emigrate north, along with other warm-loving species of fauna like hippo, ostrich and zebra. Whether these more or less moderns persisted in their occupation of the area after, say 90,000–80,000 BP is unclear. Around 60,000 BP the same region saw perhaps the arrival of cold-adapted Neanderthalers (like those represented by the Kebara remains), coming down into the warmer refuge area of the Levant when the hardships of the consolidating ice age in Europe drove some at least of the Neanderthal folk south, along with brown bear, wolf and woolly rhino. Over the next ten to twenty thousand years the Levantine Neanderthalers seem to have shared to some degree in a local genetic pool that took in some fully sapiens tendencies, evolving some traits (seen, for example, in the Amud adult male) that distinguished them from their classic European Neanderthal contemporaries in the direction of the moderns. (The next attested appearance of fully modern humanity in the region occurs at Ksar Akil in the Lebanon, with a juvenile Homo sapiens sapiens associated with an Upper Palaeolithic industry at about 37,000 BP, and there are moderns again at Qafzeh at about 35,000 BP.) Whether there was a continual coming and going of both moderns and Neanderthalers in the Levantine area after 60,000 BP is again unclear – we have found too few fossils of either sort to be sure. Perhaps the Levantine moderns largely retreated into Africa at some time after about 80,000 BP with the growing cold, perhaps some stayed on. (A ten-year-old non-Neanderthal child’s bones have recently been found in the Nile Valley at about 55,000 BP.) Perhaps, after the arrival of the Neanderthalers in the Levant, the two sorts of humanity coexisted in some way that brought them into little or no direct contact for much of the time, pursuing slightly different hunting strategies, for example, that saw the moderns more prone to travel about and come and go. Their tool kits shared in common make it impossible to settle these questions without more fossils. Perhaps there was some interbreeding to account for the modernish traits of the late Neanderthalers of the area, but equally perhaps the two sorts of humanity largely avoided each other and sexual attraction between them ran at a low ebb. If things had gone so far that any matings between them produced infertile offspring (in other words, they were truly different species) then the modernish traits of Amud, and Shanidar, are difficult to account for (as could be the Neanderthal-like traits of some of the early moderns of Central and Eastern Europe, to be discussed later).

  Both the Levantine Neanderthalers and the Levantine moderns who preceded them wielded a Mousterian tool kit, of the sort that is called Middle Palaeolithic in Europe and Middle Stone Age in Africa. The evolution of industrial traditions out of Lower Palaeolithic (African Early Stone Age) through Middle Palaeolithic (African Middle Stone Age) into Upper Palaeolithic (African Late Stone Age) has a history all of its own, largely divorced from the evolution of human physical types by reason of the extreme paucity of these versus the abundance of finds of stone tools. It is consequently possible to trace
a technical progression, suggestive of evolving mental enhancement, in the tools found on archaeological sites with no coincidence of human fossil remains to prove absolutely that bigger and more modern brains were behind the improvements in the tool kits. The Levantine finds caution that there is no necessary correlation between Upper Palaeolithic and more or less fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens, just as the Chatelperronian finds from France indicate that no such necessary correlation exists, either, between Neanderthalers and Mousterian. Still, it remains broadly useful to conjecture that certain sorts of premature Upper Palaeolithic technological tendencies found in older contexts may hint at the evolution of cleverer, more modern human types to pioneer them. And it is the appearances of blade industries, where many of the struck flakes are much longer and thinner and flatter than those of run-of-the-mill Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age contexts, that impress as possible harbingers of technological and mental evolution. It was the blade industries of the European Upper Palaeolithic that were found early on in the history of archaeology in clear association with the remains of Crô-Magnon types and their refined bone work, adornments, grave goods, artistic and magical productions. Upper Palaeolithic blades are themselves frequently marvels of lithic sophistication, with many forms adapted to many uses as knives, scrapers, gravers, sometimes finished to a high degree, in marked contrast to the routine and comparatively unimaginative products of Middle Palaeolithic technology. It is easy to see how early dated occurrences of blade manufacture within the timespan of the Middle Stone Age can excite archaeologists on the track of the first footprints of modern humanity.

  The Klasies River Mouth site in South Africa, where those early indications of the presence of evolving Homo sapiens sapiens were turned up at about 100,000 BP, is also a place where early manifestations of blade manufacture have been identified, though the blades were not found in association with the modernish physical remains (which were accompanied by ordinary enough Middle Stone Age tools, rather as Skhul and Qafzeh were accompanied by Mousterian artefacts). The blades of Klasies River Mouth, of a type found elsewhere and called by the name of the Howieson’s Poort tradition, date from about 60,000 or so BP, and are surprisingly sophisticated for their time. They include geometric forms, often tiny like the microlithic products of much later times, in the form of crescents and triangles, and many of them look as though they were struck with an intermediary punch made of wood or bone. Some pieces have the appearance of being shaped for hafting as spear points or blades into wooden holders. What is more, stone was fetched from thirty or so kilometres away to make these blade tools, more in the manner of true Upper Palaeolithic than Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age habits. It is probably fair to say that the Howieson’s Poort material (the name site is to the east of Klasies River Mouth) would be called Upper Palaeolithic without a qualm if found in Europe. The Howieson’s Poort tradition, with an age range at its various sites between some 75,000 and 40,000 BP, is itself part of a raft of blade manifestations in Africa that appear sporadically from perhaps as early as some 200,000 years ago in Kenya and reach down to true Late Stone Age times (though blades never came to predominate in Africa, nor in the Far East, as they did in Europe). The early appearances of blade technology are rather flash-in-the-pan affairs, coming and going rather quickly without bringing on the establishment of full Late Stone Age (in European terms, Upper Palaeolithic) culture. At Klasies River Mouth the blade episode is succeeded by a return to Middle Stone Age technology. The blades, moreover, are not found in association with other archaeological traits of an Upper Palaeolithic/Late Stone Age character. There is no bone work, for example, so characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, and no sign that the hunting skills of the blade-makers were any better than those of their Middle Stone Age predecessors and successors. It is as though tentative experiments in technological innovation were being haphazardly attempted here and there, without any decisive advantages to show for them among populations that were still not ready to take them further, even if they could hit on them now and then.

  A blade core and blade from Klasies River Mouth.

  Harpoons from Katanda.

  None of the early blade industries of Africa has produced evidence of bone work to go with their advanced-looking stone tools, but there is rather astonishing evidence for sophisticated bone work in itself at a very early date in Zaire. The site of Katanda, on the banks of the Semliki river, has enjoyed a contentious history of attempts to date the archaeological material found there since the late 1980s. It looks now as though the likely date of the levels from which the bone work has come lies somewhere between about 105,000 and 65,000 BP, based on TL and ESR determinations taken together with the geological situation. The stone tools of Katanda are undistinguished flake products of a Middle Stone Age sort, but the bone work includes knife-like pieces and very spectacular barbed harpoons with grooves facilitating mounting on wooden shafts, a feature not encountered in the European Upper Palaeolithic until as late as 15,000 BP. Similar finds have been made at nearby sites (in association with Late Stone Age tools) since the 1950s, with even the reported presence on some bone pieces of linear markings that might represent some sort of numerical recording, but these other finds have been dated by the radiocarbon method to as late as 25,000 or 21,000 BP. At these latter dates, the bone work of all these Zairean sites would not seem wholly out of place, but the very early dating of the Katanda material has been hard to accept without the corroboration of more well-dated sites. Certainly geological and climatological evidence suggests that Katanda is older than the other sites, but so strange and stray at some 80,000 BP are the bone harpoons – which would be an adornment of the European Upper Palaeolithic fifty thousand years or more later – that only the discovery of more such items at other sites with secure dates will satisfy wary archaeologists.

  From the number of catfish bones found in the same levels as the archaeological material, we may conclude that the Katanda harpoons were used by their makers to spear fish in the local river. Fishing is not a subsistence strategy much attested at Middle Stone Age/Middle Palaeolithic sites anywhere in the world and so, to the novelty of the sophisticated bone work, is added the unexpectedness of another Upper Palaeolithic trait – of some consequence – at Katanda by perhaps 90,000 or 80,000 BP. It has even been suggested that the finding of two separate clusters of debris at Katanda might indicate the ancient presence of two neighbouring nuclear families of prematurely Upper Palaeolithic people.

  It is another rather tallish order to think that a tradition of such sophisticated bone work, evidenced nowhere else in the world at such an early date, nor for tens of thousands of years subsequently, should have apparently gone on in the same area for so long (down to 20,000 BP) without communicating itself to any other early populations of humanity that we know of. Katanda hints at the long persistence in one, perhaps rather isolated, area of an innovatory technology and perhaps a whole way of life pioneered tens of thousands of years before they appeared elsewhere in the wider world. Perhaps there are more sites like Katanda to be discovered in Africa, where we may hope that human remains might be found to throw light on the evolution of the sort of humanity that could produce the Katanda harpoons and fish with them. Certainly, until further finds are made and dated to everyone’s satisfaction, the Katanda harpoons cannot clinch the argument that fully modern humanity and the modern mode of life originated in Africa at some time around 100,000 BP and spread out from there to the rest of the world. But it has to be said that it must have been in such small and isolated ways that the very first steps were taken somewhere towards the way of life that was to spread far and wide with Homo sapiens sapiens and the Upper Palaeolithic. A patchwork of initially intermittent or isolated manifestations of the components that eventually came together as the Upper Palaeolithic is quite plausible.

  It is tantalizing that no single line of evidence – whether to do with genetics or fossils or archaeological finds – amounts to proof of an African
antecedence for Homo sapiens sapiens, or at least for the best part of his genetic make-up and technological equipment; taken as a whole, the body of evidence of different lines of enquiry is powerfully suggestive to many anthropologists of the African origins of modern humanity, but with no conclusive proof of the case in any specific department.

  No more bone work of the sort seen at Katanda (or really of any sort at all) is known from the archaeological record elsewhere over all the years that separate the Zairean finds at some 90,000 or 80,000 BP (if the dates stand up) from those of the European Upper Palaeolithic after about 40,000 BP. But blade industries do continue to manifest themselves here and there between the time of the early South and East African appearances and the emergence of the true blade-based Upper Palaeolithic cultures. These blade manifestations necessarily occur against a background of generally Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age traditions (sometimes even of Lower Palaeolithic/Old Stone Age ones, where these lingered on); it is common to find the blade industries underlain and/or overlain by Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age material, as is the case at Klasies River Mouth. The same sort of situation obtains at Haua Fteah in Libya, at Abri Zumoffen in Lebanon and at Mount Carmel in Israel, though none of the human remains of the latter area was found in association with the blade material, which archaeologists know by the name ‘Amudian’ after the same site in which – at different levels – the Neanderthal remains were found. In both Libya and the Levant the blade episodes (at about 70,000 BP) are succeeded by a return to Mousterian material, well before the establishment of true Upper Palaeolithic industries in both areas after about 45,000 BP. Whoever was making these flash-in-the-pan blade industries of North Africa and the Levant, and whatever the potential advantages of their innovatory tool kits, in the aftermath it was always back to the Mousterian for the time being. The more or less moderns of Skhul and Qafzeh wielded Mousterian tools, with no blade element, so if we are tempted (reasonably) to identify the blade manifestations with evolving modern Homo sapiens sapiens, we have to conclude that blade-making was not an idea that recommended itself to all the populations of moderns all the time, but was rather something tried now and then by some groups (maybe for particular reasons at the time) and then dropped for a while, perhaps to be taken up again later, or not. It is as though the intermittent blade-makers were clever enough to hit on the idea of blades but not yet able to integrate this promising technology into their entire imaginations and think it through to get the best out of it. Indeed, we may speculate that they yet lacked any integrated and entire imagination into which all the experiences of their lives could be pooled, to make fruitful connections between every aspect of their existence. Modern looking as the brain-cases of the early moderns are (at Skhul and Qafzeh, for example), we may well conclude that consciousness as we know it was absent within them – whether because some further brain evolution, invisible in the fossil record, was still to be accomplished or because a necessary groundwork of cultural evolution, in terms of acquired habits of mind (perhaps involving language developments), was not yet in place. Perhaps too many parts of the mind were still on separate automatic pilots, with no all-embracing and directing consciousness. All this remains for the moment highly speculative, of course, but it is to these areas of enquiry that we must look to try to explain the emergence of modern humanity with the Upper Palaeolithic of some 45,000 years ago. Meanwhile, it may be salutary to note that the very development of blade technology, which we so firmly associate in Europe with the self-evident glories of Upper Palaeolithic modernity in the shape of art and burial rites, social and cultural elaboration, was never in any case the be-all and end-all of sub-Saharan or Far Eastern Late Stone Age tool traditions – blades were not an important part of the tool kits of the people of these regions.