The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  There is another lesson arising from this incident: absolute dating techniques are not always reliable. Carbon dating has gone through successive stages of calibration and correction since the 1950s as researchers became more aware of its limitations and learned to compensate for contamination and for changes in the atmospheric concentration of 14C. TL and ESR dating have also been improved since the 1980s. It is always instructive when different techniques (or even the same technique) produce different results on the same material, and there has been a general trend towards testing smaller sample sizes in order to eliminate contamination.

  A modern human skull from Skhul, Israel, probably a little older than the Qafzeh skull. With the development of new dating techniques in the 1980s, the modern humans from Qafzeh and Skhul were redated to before the time that Neanderthals occupied nearby sites like Amud and Kebara.

  The one site we have not mentioned in this respect – Tabun – forces us to qualify the extraordinary claim about Homo sapiens pre-dating Neanderthals in Asia. Some radiometric dates for Tabun place the site at the same time as Qafzeh and Skhul, if not earlier. The key here is a buried skeleton labelled Tabun C1, which was dated to 100,000–120,000 years ago by ESR, while TL puts it at more than 160,000 years old. The latest U-series dates, however, suggest that it may be as recent as 20,000 years old, which, in a highly unlikely twist, would make it the last living Neanderthal identified anywhere in the world. It is possible that when the Neanderthals used Tabun as a burial site, they dug into deeper stratigraphic layers before depositing the bones, giving them the appearance of older age. Unfortunately the dating of Tabun is difficult to resolve, especially because the excavation did not benefit from modern excavation techniques, occurred before these dating techniques were developed and because the site has been completely dug out, precluding any re-examination of the layers.

  While we are left with some uncertainty whether the earliest humans to reach the Levant were the early modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul, or the Neanderthals at Tabun, what we can say is that there is an overall pattern of a modern human occupation giving way to a Neanderthal occupation. This is the only place in the world where this pattern is evident. What it demonstrates is that humans did not evolve – as many used to believe – as a single global population undergoing a series of changes from the earliest Homo to the present. Instead we have a paradigm of diversity, in which there were many human species sharing the planet at any given stage until very recently.

  Aside from the question of which species arrived in Asia first, the most remarkable aspect of the sites in northern Israel is the evidence they contain of intentional burial. How can we be certain which skeletons came to rest in the caves and rock shelters through interment?

  In establishing intentional burial, archaeologists look for relatively complete skeletons positioned as if they have been laid to rest, evidence that the skeletons have been deposited within pre-excavated pits and for associations with possible grave goods. The archaeologist Paul Pettitt has surveyed early evidence for burials around the world, and he argues that at least four early modern humans at Skhul and at least six at Qafzeh were buried. The skeletons are mostly complete, there is evidence for grave-cutting and, somewhat touchingly, both sites have a possible mother-and-child association.

  For the Neanderthal sites, Pettitt argues that at least three individuals at Amud, one at Tabun and two at Kebara were buried. The female at Tabun may be associated with an infant, leading to speculation that the burial might have followed a death in childbirth. An unambiguous adult burial was excavated at Kebara by Bar-Yosef in 1982 (see p. 136). Dating up to 60,000 years old, it rested in a pit that was clearly dug into earlier archaeological layers, and the position of the body shows that it was deposited soon after death.

  For most researchers this Neanderthal individual at Kebara settled an old debate over the question of whether the Neanderthals could speak. Despite the fact that the skull has not survived, the skeleton possesses a modern-looking hyoid bone, which is an essential part of the vocal architecture of Homo sapiens, and it could well have functioned in Neanderthals the same way as it does in us. With this hyoid bone, the Neanderthals may have been able to produce a range of sounds to form speech of great complexity.

  Yet these burials do begin to hint at a difference in behaviour between the two varieties of human. This difference is seen not only in the bones, but in what was buried with them. At Amud a Neanderthal child burial is associated with a deer bone, and at Kebara a Neanderthal child burial contains a rhinoceros tooth. As for the early modern human sites, a burial at Skhul is associated with a large wild boar mandible, and deer antlers were placed on top of a child burial at Qafzeh. The Homo sapiens were buried with slightly more prominent animal bones than the Neanderthals were, and this hints at a more important distinction.

  It was once thought that only modern humans deliberately buried their dead, as seen here in a burial from Qafzeh, Israel (right), but scholars now believe that the Neanderthals did the same, as represented by examples from Kebara, Israel (left) and Shanidar, Iraq (centre).

  At both Qafzeh and Skhul mollusc shell beads were found in possible association with the skeletons. Because the excavations took place a long time ago, without modern recording techniques, we cannot be sure that these were grave goods. We can be sure, however, that the people at Qafzeh and Skhul were using ornamental jewelry. Furthermore, red ochre was found in at least two of the graves at Qafzeh. Red ochre can be of ambiguous significance, because it can be used as an adhesive (e.g. to help bind a Levallois point to a wooden spear), as part of the preparation of hides and as a dye. Red ochre appears in European Neanderthal sites, such as Maastricht-Belvédère in the Netherlands from as early as 250,000 years ago. Archaeologists have argued that at Qafzeh it was used as a dye.

  The use of jewelry and dye are both symbolic behaviours, which is one of the few behavioural differences we can discern, at least in degree, between early modern humans and Neanderthals some 100,000 years ago. Israel is not the only place one can find shell beads and red ochre. We can also find them at sites in Morocco, Algeria and South Africa, and this points to an African origin of the Qafzeh and Skhul people.

  The humans at Qafzeh and Skhul were Homo sapiens like us, but they were not fully modern. Humans possessing a modern anatomy came out of Africa to Asia at a later date. The people of Qafzeh and Skhul were not the main ancestors of the modern population of the region. Instead we are left with the uncomfortable fact that this early foray by early modern humans into Asia seems to have ended in failure. This upsets the common notion that the emergence of our species was a kind of inevitable march to human perfection.

  Tens of thousands of years after Qafzeh and Skhul, Neanderthals lived in northern Israel and, as we discuss below, were pushing deeper and deeper into Asia. What happened to the sapiens? And where had they come from?

  The great leap forward in Africa

  One of the most significant effects of the Eemian interglacial in Africa was the greening of the Sahara desert. Enormous lakes and a network of rivers connected the north African coast with the rest of the continent. With the entrance of humans into north Africa, where they appear to have flourished, it is not hard to imagine a group of them crossing from Egypt into Israel. A closer look at the bones makes exactly this case.

  Back in the 1970s Stringer had linked the people of Qafzeh and Skhul to two African skulls, one from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, the other from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. Both were discovered in the 1960s and are now dated to 195,000 years ago (Omo Kibish) and 160,000 years ago (Jebel Irhoud). More recently the palaeoanthropologists Katerina Harvati and Jean-Jacques Hublin have linked another Moroccan skull, this one from Dar Es-Soltan dating to 80,000 years ago, to this same group. Harvati has further argued that the types of teeth found in north Africa from this period closely resemble those at Qafzeh and Skhul.

  The humid, warm Eemian, which coincided with the beginning of this behavioural leap and expansio
n into Asia, was 10,000 years long and ended 120,000 years ago. Yet the Sahara seems to have remained habitable until around 60,000 years ago, and humans continued to thrive in north Africa. From Morocco to Libya early modern humans developed a regional toolmaking tradition known as the Aterian. Aterian tools, derived from the African tradition of prepared-core technologies, are triangular and were probably mounted as spear-points.

  Were the Qafzeh and Skhul people part of the Aterian culture? In the strict sense of following their stone tool manufacture, they were not. Their tools were Mousterian and were similar to those used by Neanderthals in the area. Stone tools from a different site, however, do link inhabitants of the Middle East to Africa. In 2010 the archaeologist Jeffrey Rose discovered a cache of triangular stone tools in Oman from over 100,000 years ago which look surprisingly like tools from Sudan from the same period. While these tools, which were made by the Levallois technique, are not associated with human remains, many archaeologists view their close similarity as evidence of migration out of Africa. It is possible that in this period there were a series of small forays from Africa to the Middle East, and we are only seeing glimpses of it in the archaeological record.

  North Africa has only recently emerged as an important region in human evolution. Its status in the human story comes not just from the bones, which are almost modern, but from some of the earliest evidence of a uniquely modern human behaviour. There are five sites in Morocco and Algeria that, like Qafzeh and Skhul, have produced mollusc shells with tell-tale puncture holes for use as jewelry. Similar shell beads have appeared as far away as Blombos Cave in South Africa.

  For archaeologists looking for a point of origin for modern human behaviour and anatomy, it is confounding that the greatest collections of archaeological sites are on the northern and southern coasts of the continent, separated by more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles). This bi-coastal phenomenon is an intriguing one. When modern humans finally made a successful transition from Africa to Asia, they spread quickly around the world, first along a coastal route all the way to Australia. It seems that our species made its great leap forward in a coastal environment. (This may be good news to nutritionists who posit a link between brain development and omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fish.) It has not yet been established whether these behaviours first occurred simultaneously on the two ends of Africa or if modern humans spread them around the African coast.

  A trio of sites in South Africa, Blombos Cave, Klasies River Mouth and Pinnacle Point, contain early evidence of modern behaviour by Homo sapiens. In the early 2000s evidence for the earliest symbolism at Blombos Cave, on the southern coast of the continent, was scientifically dated to 100,000 years ago. This convinced most archaeologists that the roots of modernity, the so-called Upper Palaeolithic revolution that is well documented in Europe, can be traced to Africa. Blombos Cave contains evidence of a whole suite of modern behaviours, including ornamentation (with mollusc shell beads), fishing and a form of stone tool manufacture called pressure flaking (see the discussion of stone tools in Chapter Four), which the Neanderthals never used. Perhaps the most striking object from this site is a plaque of red ochre which is scored, or engraved, with cross-hatches (see p. 139). As we discussed in relation to Qafzeh and Skhul, red ochre can be used as an adhesive or as a dye. The striations on the red ochre at Blombos Cave make a strong case that its use here was symbolic, and that the early modern humans at the site were using paint, perhaps on their bodies. Archaeologists have also recovered what looks like a painting ‘tool kit’ and a processing workshop. Teeth recovered from Blombos Cave are almost typical for fully modern humans, sitting right on the edge of modern variation.

  The cave sites of Klasies River Mouth from a similar date also contain human remains that are nearly modern. The Klasies bones show signs of possible cannibalism. Between Klasies River and Blombos is the site of Pinnacle Point, which has some of the world’s oldest evidence of shell fishing (from more than 160,000 years ago) and also has red ochre.

  The evidence from the northern and southern coasts of Africa points to a significant change among Homo sapiens which started before the Eemian and accelerated after it. Exploiting a coastal environment, humans were starting to use symbolism in the form of jewelry and red pigment over a wide area.

  What is the significance of symbolism as a milestone in human development? In general, it is indicative of cognitive complexity – the ability to understand that a thing (e.g. a mollusc shell), in a certain context (e.g. a necklace), can have social meaning (e.g. the fact that the wearer has good taste and is well connected). The introduction of symbolism was probably also linked to more complex language, for example in the use of metaphor. Neanderthals at this stage were using red ochre, but it is not clear that this was a form of symbolism. Neanderthals may have started using bird talons for ornamentation during this period, but this was limited, perhaps just to the site of Krapina (see next section). Ultimately symbolism shows an extension of social networks, which was a key competitive advantage modern humans had over groups that had not made the leap. Much later, Neanderthals also produced a cross-hatch pattern in a cave in Gibraltar (dubbed the first Neanderthal ‘hashtag’), which, like the bird talons, may point to incipient symbolic thinking but was not nearly as extensive as the modern human use of shell jewelry.

  At first modern humans seem to have made limited forays into Asia, reaching Israel and perhaps the Arabian Peninsula, but these were probably unsuccessful. Opinion differs on the exact date of the final, successful African exodus, but most researchers put it well after Qafzeh and Skhul. In 2015 researchers announced the discovery of a modern human skull from a cave in Israel near the Lebanese border dating to around 55,000 years ago, and this may be part of this wave of modern humans. At this time Eurasia was inhabited by Neanderthals, modern humans, Denisovans and possibly other groups such as Homo floresiensis. The stage was set for the final test – which human line was best adapted.

  Meanwhile, back in Europe

  As early Homo sapiens left Africa for Asia during the Eemian interglacial, what does the archaeological record say about developments in the Neanderthal homeland of Europe? The continent remained very much as it was before, with a population of Neanderthals using Mousterian stone tools. Their hunting prowess may have improved, and there is evidence that they could take down an impressive array of animals: bison, bear, mammoth and the exceptionally large two-horned Merck’s rhinoceros. There is also some evidence they ate other Neanderthals, although there has been much controversy about this.

  While there are many European sites from this time with Mousterian stone tools, there are only a few collections of human remains that are securely dated to the Eemian and the time immediately after it. These are the two Saccopastore skulls, found in a gravel pit just outside Rome in 1929 and 1935, and a cache of more than 800 human remains excavated from Krapina, a collapsed cave in Croatia close to the border with Slovenia, from 1899 to 1905. An additional site in France, Moula-Guercy, which contains several dozen Neanderthal bone fragments, has also been dated to this time.

  Researchers cite similarities between the Saccopastore and Krapina Neanderthals. Both populations were not quite as robust, or thick-boned, as the Neanderthals that came after them.

  At the time of its discovery Krapina represented one of the greatest collections of ancient human bones ever found, and it certainly retains its place in that elite class, comparable to Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca. Estimates of the number of individuals represented at Krapina have gone as high as seventy-five or eighty, but have since been revised downwards to about one third of that total. The bones are gracile for Neanderthals and highly fragmented. Some bones show signs of osteoarthritis and healed fractures.

  As is the case at Sima de los Huesos, there have been various theories about how such a disarticulated mass of human bones found its way into Krapina Cave. Due to cut marks evident on many of the bones, the excavator, Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger, suggested tha
t they had been cannibalized. More recently, others such as Eric Trinkaus and Mary Russell have proposed that the cut marks came about through ritualized defleshing and secondary burial of the dead rather than cannibalism. The anthropologist David Frayer, meanwhile, takes the middle ground, arguing that most of the cut marks are evidence of cannibalism while some indicate ritual.

  As we argued in Chapter Two when we discussed cases of cannibalism at Gran Dolina, we believe that cannibalism is the most logical explanation for the cut marks on these bones. Neanderthals who were used to butchering large game would have had little problem in butchering other Neanderthals. We know from studies of Neanderthal teeth that episodes of severe starvation were not uncommon, and it would be shocking if they let protein go to waste, especially after taking the trouble of defleshing their deceased kin.

  The archaeologist Timothy Taylor has noted in his book The Artificial Ape (2010) that despite widespread evidence for cannibalism in prehistory, including cannibalism by fully modern humans, researchers often dismiss strong ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidence for the practice, possibly from a well-meaning anti-racism. Trinkaus, for example, called cannibalism ‘that dreaded, bestial practice’, and argued that archaeologists who wished to show a clear separation between us and them employed the interpretation as a sort of smear against the Neanderthals. Cannibalism may be ‘an ugly specter’, in Trinkaus’s terms, but it requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to believe that extensive defleshing went on at Krapina without any subsequent consumption of that flesh. And we must remember that cannibalism may separate us from our prehistoric forebears, but it certainly does not represent a difference between Neanderthals and modern humans. Human flesh can be eaten for a wide range of reasons, such as respect for the dead or as part of the bounty of a victory in conflict. The practice does not necessarily mean that Neanderthals lacked respect for their own kind. What it probably does reflect is that they went through difficult periods of protein shortage.