The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  Since then, there have been several major news stories every year on the Neanderthals. Atapuerca, a cave network in Spain, has produced the remains of around thirty individual ‘proto-Neanderthals’, an astonishing total if we consider that the number of Neanderthal individuals in the fossil record is only a few hundred. In 2007 a discovery from a different part of Atapuerca pushed definitive evidence for the earliest occupation of Europe, possibly by a Neanderthal predecessor species, over the 1-million-year mark for the first time. And more recently, a team in Germany led by Svante Pääbo (see p. 143) has made staggering claims based on the identification of Neanderthal DNA. It can be hard at times to make sense of this flood of information.

  The number of scientific disciplines contributing to Neanderthal research in recent years has multiplied. Our knowledge has been boosted by a variety of specialists: geologists who drill sediments from the deep ocean floor and take ice cores from glaciers covering Greenland and Antarctica; archaeologists who sieve and sort through every ounce of dirt from an excavation looking for anything from seeds to rodent teeth; geneticists who put on sterile clothing to drill Neanderthal bones in the hope of finding bits that have neither fossilized nor been contaminated by flakes of their own skin in order to extract ancient DNA; and, of course, those archaeology students who kneel down with a trowel and a brush to excavate squares of earth, layer by layer, carefully recording the location of every stone tool or bone they might find (and hoping they aren’t embarrassed by confusing the two).

  We now know more than we ever thought we could about the Neanderthals and their world. They have emerged as more accomplished in their everyday lives and more complex in their social behaviour than we imagined. This makes it all the more puzzling why this separate form of human, nearly as advanced biologically and culturally as ourselves, became extinct. The fate of the Neanderthals has been a mystery for more than 150 years.

  The valley of the new man

  But before we consider the Neanderthals’ fate, let us explore their discovery. There is a satisfying irony in the fact that we discovered our former human rivals in the course of supplying the energy and materials for global domination. It is no exaggeration to say that our knowledge of the Neanderthals was an unexpected by-product of industrial mining in the 19th century. As engineers were digging ever deeper for minerals, evidence was fast accumulating about the Earth’s past.

  ‘There will be very soon little left to discover,’ was how The Times of London described the science of geology in 1863. The occasion was the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual summer meeting in Newcastle. The conference was enormous, with scores of mineralogists, geologists, chemists and others from dozens of burgeoning scientific disciplines. It was here that a little-known professor called William King became the first person to use fossil evidence to name an extinct species closely related to our own.

  Sir William Armstrong celebrates the rapid progress of science in his keynote address to the 1863 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as depicted in an engraving from the Illustrated London News. Later in the conference, the Neanderthals received their scientific name, Homo neanderthalensis.

  Professor William King, of Queen’s College, Galway, Ireland, who suggested the name ‘Homo Neanderthalensis’.

  Drawing of the original Neanderthal skull from Man’s Place in Nature by Thomas Huxley.

  The conference’s keynote speaker was Sir William Armstrong, a local industrialist and engineer. In celebrating the fast pace of discovery, he noted that in short order Charles Darwin had finished On the Origin of Species, John Speke and James Grant had found the source of the Nile and Charles Lyell had published Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, which extended human history deep into the past. One of Lyell’s protégés, Professor King had come to the meeting from Queen’s College, Galway, in Ireland to present a short paper on a recent discovery from a lime quarry near Düsseldorf, in what was then Prussia. Some sixteen years earlier he had been forced out of his job as curator of the Newcastle Museum. Now he hoped to return in triumph.

  In his paper King discussed human-like bones that had turned up in a cave (Feldhofer) in the Neander Valley seven years earlier. The collection included ribs, arm and leg bones and the top of a skull that featured a protruding crest above the eyes. In a departure from the prevailing view that the bones belonged to a deformed member of our own species, King argued that they dated to the glacial period and were closer to the chimpanzee than to any modern human. We now know that King was wrong on this last point, for the individuals from the Neander Valley were much closer to modern humans than chimpanzees. But he was correct in his more startling conclusion, when he argued that they were fundamentally different from all living humans.

  He proposed ‘to distinguish the species by the name Homo Neanderthalensis’ after the Neander Valley where they were discovered. In the process, he unwittingly immortalized a 17th-century psalmist, Joachim Neumann. Following the Philhellenic fashions of the 19th century, Neumann’s last name (literally ‘new man’) was translated to the Greek ‘Neander’ and then attached to the valley (‘thal’ in German) where he penned his psalms. Thanks to King, members of the long-extinct species unearthed there have been known by the wonderfully ironic name of Neanderthals (people from the valley of the new man).

  Before that day, the nearest known species to humans were living apes. Today there are more than twenty named species in our family tree since the split from the apes, and with recent discoveries such as Homo floresiensis – the so-called ‘Hobbit’ – in Indonesia in 2003 and the Denisovans from Siberia whose genes were identified in 2010, it seems likely that this number will continue to increase.

  Before the discovery in the Neander Valley in 1856, other Neanderthal remains – a small child’s skull from Engis, Belgium, in 1829, and an adult skull from Gibraltar in 1848 – had been unearthed, but they had not been recognized as a distinct species. Additional bones appeared in the ensuing decades, notably from Spy, Belgium, in the 1880s. Yet the Neanderthals lingered on the margins of the human evolutionary story, even as other species, such as Homo erectus in its guises as Java Man (discovered at Trinil, Indonesia, in the 1890s) and Peking Man (discovered at Zhoukoudian, China, in the 1920s and 1930s), quickly acquired the label of ‘missing link’ between ourselves and the apes.

  Today, evidence of Neanderthal occupation extends from Wales all the way to Siberia. In this book, we trace the evolution of the Neanderthals in Europe, their expansion into Asia and their ultimate encounter with our own ancestors. Each successive chapter moves us closer to the present and covers smaller and smaller chunks of time. This is not because the distant past necessarily contained fewer noteworthy developments – though change seems to have occurred more slowly then – but because the evidence of more recent times is better preserved.

  New questions

  With all the recent advances in Neanderthal research, there are new, intriguing and sometimes unexpected questions. In addition, things we thought we knew, like scientific dates, are sometimes overturned in the light of new evidence. In each stage of Neanderthal evolution, and in every chapter in this book, there are questions to which we do not have definitive answers; but we can now at least make reasonable attempts to answer them. Part of the enjoyment for us, and we hope for you, is to use the available evidence to put together a plausible story.

  We start around 1 million years ago with the first human entry into Europe, which would ultimately become the Neanderthal homeland. Who were Europe’s first colonizers, and why did it take so long for them to get there, when humans had gone from Africa to southeast Asia almost a million years earlier? (Intriguingly, this pattern is mirrored much more recently by modern humans, who also reached southeast Asia before Europe.) Did they arrive in Europe from Africa or Asia? How successful was this first wave?

  The bones discovered in 1856 in Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley near Düss
eldorf, Germany, that led to the first identification of an extinct human species.

  While Europe has been inhabited by human species since around 1 million years ago, it was only by 500,000 years ago that incipient Neanderthal traits first appeared. Was this a case of local evolution or did a new group arrive? The Europeans at that time used the same primary stone tool – the handaxe – that was favoured by people throughout Africa and much of Asia. What led the Europeans to take a different evolutionary path from their neighbours when they had so much in common?

  Neanderthals took on a distinctive form by 250,000 years ago. As their bones became unmistakably Neanderthal, their stone tools changed, and in a sense their technology improved. Instead of the large, unwieldy handaxe, they started using lighter, pocket-sized stone tools with long, sharp edges. The biggest mystery about this new kind of cutting tool is why it appeared almost simultaneously in at least three locations, Europe, western Asia and southern Africa. Does this indicate some form of contact between early Neanderthals in Europe and the ancestors of modern humans in Africa, or are lightweight, versatile stone tools an inevitable outcome of larger brains? This begs the question of why Europeans and Africans, apparently in parallel, were both evolving larger brains.

  A sustained warm period that began some 130,000 years before the present enabled Neanderthals and modern humans to expand simultaneously from their separate homelands, ending the era of isolation in which they had evolved into separate species. (We follow the convention of calling them separate species on the grounds of the differences in the shapes of their bones, and not because of any opinion as to their ability to reproduce successfully together.) As the two human lines spread into Asia, it was not yet clear which of them was better positioned to take advantage of the opportunity to increase their population size. At the time there were perhaps four or five distinct types of human. To us, the world feels small. With modern transportation, we can reach almost any destination within twenty-four hours. How did our little planet come to support so many different forms of humanity?

  Clutching very similar stone tools, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were the prime contenders to dominate the Earth, coming out of Europe and Africa, respectively. It is unclear which human species were in Asia at this time: whether Homo erectus still survived in east Asia, or if the recently discovered dwarf human species, Homo floresiensis – possibly an even more archaic species – was then living on the island of Flores in modern Indonesia. There may also have been another group, tentatively called Denisovans, in Asia. How close was the Earth to becoming a Neanderthal world? The safe money was on the Neanderthals emerging as masters of the planet. They were far stronger than the other species. They had survived the kind of cold conditions that were making life increasingly difficult for everybody. And their brains were large. Modern humans were contenders, but were physically much weaker than the Neanderthals and had no chance in straight combat. The only tiny advantage we know that Homo sapiens had was that it had started producing jewelry with little beads and shells, and the Neanderthals had not. The significance of this would later become clear.

  Modern humans and Neanderthals both reached the Near East some time after 130,000 years ago. This was one of the most interesting moments in prehistory, as two human species roamed over the same territory. There is much we do not know about that epoch, starting with the question of whether the two species were there at the same time, whether they encountered each other and, indeed, if they interbred. What we do know is that this is close to the time when modern humans began to establish themselves as masters of the planet. But Neanderthals were also increasingly successful, reaching deeper into Asia.

  Everything changed for the Neanderthals by around 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens penetrated deep into their European homeland. This was the beginning of the end for a proud species of human. But how did they fail? Did they go quietly, retreating and dwindling away? Were they hostile or did they welcome the new arrivals? And how did we emerge victorious? Can we say for certain that there actually was any interaction? Did the two species interbreed during this final encounter with each other?

  Alternative futures

  We are now the sole survivors in what used to be a diverse human world. It has been left to science fiction writers to imagine an alternative future in which pockets of Neanderthals live on in places such as Tajikistan, northern California and Swindon, UK. We cannot help but wonder: were it not for our own advances, would the Neanderthals have colonized the rest of the planet, replacing holdovers of more archaic species? Would they have accomplished all the things that modern humans have done – agriculture and architecture, states and warfare, science and psychoanalysis?

  There is a comfort in imagining the Neanderthals as a sort of back-up plan for human domination of the planet, had we not been around. On the other hand, when considering the extinction of our closest relatives, it is hard not to think of our own prospects. In a strange sense, the price we have paid for our knowledge of the Neanderthals – or at least for the civilization that has enabled us to learn about the deep past – is the very stability that has got us this far. Our world is about to be shaken by another major change in climate. If we suffer a significant jump in warming, as we almost certainly will over the next few generations, or if we experience a new glaciation, which will surely come unless global warming somehow delays its arrival, our survival as a species may hang in the balance.

  These grand thoughts have been a part of Neanderthal research from the beginning. Let us return to Sir William Armstrong’s speech to the British Association in 1863, when he considered the impacts of the industry that had brought Newcastle to prominence in his day. The previous twenty-five years, Armstrong declared, had seen the emergence of the railway and transatlantic steam navigation to the point where life had become almost unthinkable without transportation driven by coal. Even at this early stage of industrialization, Armstrong foresaw that the prosperity of Newcastle in 1863 would not last for ever.

  In an eerie echo of today’s predictions about the end of the oil age, Armstrong calculated that Britain’s coal reserves would run out by the year 2075, and he turned to the promise of solar energy as the likely guarantor of continued progress. As we edge closer to that date, it is not the end of energy supplies that worries us most, though that is indeed a great concern, but the effect that two hundred years of accelerating greenhouse gas emissions (of which coal burning is a leading contributor) will have on the global climate system. And we are still waiting for solar energy to live up to its promise.

  Yet Armstrong was certainly confident about our prospects. Thanks to Lyell and his colleagues, the scientists of 1863 knew ‘that the human race has existed on the earth in a barbarian state for a period exceeding the limit of historical record’, dating back to a time when global temperatures were much colder. Humanity had survived extreme hardship before.

  The Neanderthals also survived numerous episodes of extreme climate change, but they did not live to see the ice melt from northern Europe at the start of the Holocene – the current warm period that began some 10,000 years ago. As we look at the rise and fall of our closest human cousins and at our own inheritance of a world without other human species, we hope to understand what the future may hold for us.

  Will we go the way of the Neanderthals, who, after all, lived for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe as opposed to our few tens of thousands? Compared with what the Neanderthals experienced, the modern human story has only just begun.

  CHAPTER two

  The First Europeans:

  1 million to 600,000 years ago

  For the first five or six million years since they split from the apes, our ancestors did not enter Europe. There have been only three or four ape-descendant species in our family tree – what we call hominins – to live there. The Neanderthals are the only species – out of around twenty identified in our lineage – that we are reasonably certain evolved there. From the point of view of deep
prehistory, Homo sapiens are relative newcomers to the continent that was the Neanderthals’ birthplace and long-term homeland. Yet we do not know how long the Neanderthals’ ancestors inhabited Europe. Did they arrive more than a million years ago, with the first human occupation, or was it just 600,000 years ago, following a period of extreme cold that may have wiped out the European pioneers? As modern humans, we have a stake in this issue, because it has implications about the timing both of our evolutionary separation from the Neanderthals and of possible ancient gene flow between Europe and Africa.

  What we do know is that by 1 million years ago parts of Europe were occupied by a human species. But there are many unanswered questions about this species, starting with what it should be called: Homo erectus (which was present in Asia in this period), Homo antecessor (a name proposed by a Spanish team which uncovered some of the oldest European fossils) or Homo heidelbergensis (the name of a later European species)? Whatever species it was, did it arrive directly from Africa or was it an offshoot of an established Asian Homo erectus population? Why did it lack the characteristic Homo erectus stone tool, the handaxe, which was common at that time in Africa and the Near East? Did it give rise to the Neanderthals, or did it go extinct due to increasingly bitter cold periods or, perhaps, competition with later arrivals?

  None of these questions could have been asked before the mid-1990s. Up to then, there was little sign that humans had been in Europe before a mere 500,000 years ago. But conclusive evidence emerged from a handful of sites in Spain and Britain to push that date back by a significant margin. Two of these sites are located within a few hundred metres of each other at Atapuerca in northern Spain: Sima del Elefante (‘Pit of the Elephant’, named after a fossil elephant found there) and Gran Dolina (‘Great Basin’) are part of a cave complex that is remarkable for its unexpectedly ancient dates – the earliest being up to 1.2 million years ago – and large quantity of human remains.