The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  Debate has continued over the question of cannibalism at Krapina. Our own interpretation has been given some scientific legitimacy thanks to a re-examination of the bones by the anthropologists Tim White and Nicholas Toth. White and Toth established formal criteria for cannibalism based on the cut marks and deposition of the bones and on the preferences for which bones were selected for cutting, and they compared patterns of Neanderthal butchery of game animals with what can be observed on Neanderthal bones. From a series of such studies they argue that Krapina is one of many Neanderthal sites in Croatia, France and elsewhere that show significant evidence for cannibalism.

  White was also part of a project in the 1990s at Moula-Guercy, a cave site above the River Rhône in France, where evidence for cannibalism has been more widely accepted. The butchered remains of six Neanderthal individuals at Moula-Guercy have been dated to more than 100,000 years ago. The processing of the Moula-Guercy bones was a little more thorough than at Krapina.

  Krapina has historically been as much a mirror of our own prejudices as it has been a key Middle Palaeolithic site. Aside from the cannibalism debate, there is the fact that it was long neglected by an archaeological community more focused on sites in France and Germany than on the European periphery. Of greater importance for our purposes was the key role that Krapina played in addressing the question of a possible Neanderthal role in the evolution of modern humans.

  In the early 20th century, before radiometric dating techniques were available, Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton suggested the label ‘classic Neanderthals’ to describe the more robust specimens from western Europe that we will meet in Chapter Six. He thought that the lighter-boned Neanderthals of Krapina represented a different race. We now know that the Krapina Neanderthals pre-dated the ‘classic Neanderthals’ by tens of thousands of years. Hooton’s work on human variability relied unduly on the concept of race, in perhaps one of the less proud phases in the history of anthropology, and it is no surprise that he interpreted human evolution in racial terms.

  Fast-forward to the 1970s, when Milford Wolpoff studied the teeth from Krapina and argued that they were on the evolutionary path towards modern human teeth. In subsequent years Wolpoff developed the multiregionalist theory of human evolution, which argued that since the days of Homo erectus humans around the globe exchanged genes within a single breeding population, despite the differences in appearance that others attributed to a proliferation of different species. In short, Krapina helped convince Wolpoff that there is a little Neanderthal in all of us.

  The countervailing narrative to this view was put forward by Chris Stringer, who also studied the Krapina material in the 1970s. Under the replacement theory, which is also called Out of Africa or Recent African Origins (Stringer’s preferred term), he proposed that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and replaced all other varieties of human, including Neanderthals. Stringer’s theory is supported by the fact that European Neanderthals were evolving towards the ‘classic’ type and away from any similarity with modern humans.

  The fate of the Neanderthals takes centre stage in Chapter Six. Were they among our own direct ancestors or did Homo sapiens replace them and cause their extinction? Thanks to modern DNA technology, we may finally have an answer to this question. Curiously the answer has enabled both Stringer and Wolpoff – supporters of Out of Africa and the multiregionalists respectively – to claim vindication.

  In 2015, Krapina hit the headlines again, when eagle talons from the site were found to have wear patterns consistent with use as jewelry. Perhaps these Neanderthals were starting along the path of the modern humans in Africa with their shell ornaments. This isolated case shows that Neanderthals may at least have had the potential for modern behaviours.

  Land of red clay

  Archaeologists love to tell stories about how they stumbled upon significant discoveries. These stories often involve stopping the car for reasons that have little to do with spotting an unexplored new site out of the window. The site of Kokkinopilos in Epirus in north-western Greece has a special place in this genre of story-telling. At the moment of its serendipitous discovery, few could have predicted the site’s importance both as the largest Neanderthal site in the region and as a training ground for young archaeologists over several generations.

  The year was 1962 and Cambridge prehistorian Eric Higgs had brought a group of students to Greece in his infamous Land Rover in the hope of finding some new Palaeolithic sites. As a project director, Higgs could become so absorbed in his work that he rarely thought of practical matters such as feeding his crew. His students learned to scrounge whatever food they could find, running into shops at any opportunity and hoping Higgs would not drive away without them. Part of the reason Higgs chose Greece was that it did not present as many difficulties as Libya, where a Cambridge team had been working for years under Charles McBurney at the Haua Fteah cave near Benghazi.

  Higgs explored high into the Pindos Mountains in Epirus. In the town of Metsovo, home to ethnic Vlachs who speak a language similar to Romanian, one of Higgs’s students, Rhys Jones (who went on to have a distinguished career in Australia), managed to communicate with the locals by drawing on his knowledge of Latin, which they seemed to understand. Deep in prehistory Neanderthals did not make it to such a high elevation in the mountains, and the team found little of interest there.

  Higgs drove the group towards the coastal lowlands, and as they came down to the foothills via the main road from Ioannina, the picturesque regional capital in the mountains, one of the team members identified what he thought was a cave, and Higgs stopped the Land Rover. The students no doubt hoped that this cave might hold riches similar to Haua Fteah, which had deposits from classical times all the way back to 200,000 years ago.

  But instead – a sad indictment of their observational skills – what Higgs’s students found in Epirus was no cave. It was a tunnel, dug into the living rock in Roman times as part of an aqueduct which provided the nearby city of Nikopolis with fresh water. In one version of what happened next, Higgs sent Jones to the top of the hill above the tunnel to see what might be of interest there. In another version, Jones simply needed a moment of privacy.

  A concrete hut overlooking the Louros River Valley from the site of Kokkinopilos, Greece, where numerous Mousterian stone tools have been discovered.

  What Jones saw was unexpected in this lush area of goat herders and small farmers. He found a vast moon-like badland with thick reddish-yellow sandy and clay deposits, eroding into deep gullies which exposed a wealth of textbook-quality Mousterian artifacts. The team had finally found what it was looking for in Greece.

  The group returned to Ioannina to inform Sotirios Dakaris, the head of the archaeological service for the region. According to Jones, Higgs had kept the artifacts they had initially found, but hid them in the car’s spare tyre, because they were on a survey mission and had not been given permission to collect anything. When Dakaris later visited the redbeds with the team, a nod from Higgs told Jones to surreptitiously grab the ancient tools and ‘salt’ the site with them to demonstrate the great potential of further investigations there.

  Dakaris was thrilled, and he and Higgs dug two test trenches and collected further samples. These stone tools formed the basis for the first professional publication of Paul Mellars, who later became professor of archaeology at Cambridge, a world-leading expert on Mousterian tools and author of The Neanderthal Legacy (1996).

  In subsequent decades the site of Kokkinopilos (literally ‘red clay’ in Greek) and other, smaller ones like it on similar redbed badlands in the area formed the basis for repeated research visits by some of the big names in Palaeolithic archaeology, including Higgs, Mellars, Geoff Bailey, John Gowlett, Clive Gamble, Curtis Runnels and Tjeerd van Andel.

  As well as providing research fodder for such eminent prehistorians, Kokkinopilos’s impact also extended into popular culture. The novelist Hammond Innes used it as a key setting in the thriller Levkas Man (1971), whic
h centres around a controversial archaeological theory by Pieter Van Der Voort, a character inspired by Higgs. In the dramatic conclusion Van Der Voort is found hiding at Kokkinopilos, where he had been using the deep eroding gullies as cover.

  The unromantic reality of Kokkinopilos and most of the sites in the area is that stone tools comprise the vast bulk of surviving artifacts. But in an eerie anticipation of the discovery of Cosquer Cave near Marseille, France, in 1985, Innes imagined in the book that early paintings were preserved on the nearby island of Levkas in a cave accessible only by divers. The archaeology of Epirus and the Ionian Islands may not be quite that exciting, but it has played a key role in our understanding of Neanderthals and modern humans in the region and in south-eastern Europe more generally.

  Why are so many Neanderthal tools exposed by the erosion of red soil deposits in north-western Greece? Most likely the redbeds are residual deposits from ancient lakes or seasonal ponds which acted as traps for sediments washed down by erosion from the surrounding mountain slopes. Millennia of earthquakes and tectonic uplift have long since drained the water and left behind the sterile red clay. The stone tools are evidence of Neanderthals visiting the lakes to catch prey that would have been attracted to the water.

  Kokkinopilos is the mother of these sites – the first one to be discovered, the biggest one and the one with the widest range of tools. At other, smaller sites in the region, Neanderthals used a variety of techniques to manufacture Mousterian tools. Kokkinopilos is the only site that contains evidence of all these techniques. This means that the site was probably teeming with wildlife and attracted Neanderthals over many millennia.

  In addition to the Roman aqueduct that runs underneath Kokkinopilos, one curious modern architectural feature on the site is a small concrete hut which acts as a shelter for shepherds. According to the locals this structure, which overlooks the road, was used by German soldiers during the Second World War to guard the main supply route to Ioannina. The Nazis, it seems, used the site in much the same way as the Neanderthals – as the ideal spot to observe movement through the narrow ravine that is the main route from the coastal plains into the mountains. Neanderthals, of course, would have had access to the ancient lake which has long since disappeared, and they would have been tracking animal herds in the valley, while the Nazis were looking for resistance fighters.

  Pushing east

  We began this chapter with the image of a Neanderthal at Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, looking out across the water and not quite being able to see modern humans inhabiting the north coast of Africa. Between 130,000 and 60,000 years ago modern humans using symbolic behaviours had exploited a coastal environment and expanded along a north–south axis, stretching from Morocco to South Africa. What was the Neanderthals’ own range as they pushed eastwards during this period?

  Tabun, Kebara and Amud in northern Israel are some 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) east of Gibraltar. About 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) further east we arrive at the cave of Shanidar in Iraqi Kurdistan, close to the Iranian border, where nine Neanderthal skeletons were unearthed in the 1950s by Ralph Solecki of Columbia University (evidence for a tenth was discovered in a subsequent study). You have to travel the same distance again to reach Teshik-Tash, Uzbekistan, where a Neanderthal child was excavated by the Soviet archaeologist Alexey Okladnikov in 1938. Another 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) further east still, thanks to DNA testing on bones of ambiguous affiliation from Okladnikov Cave (named after the Siberian-born excavator of Teshik-Tash), and bones from nearby Denisova Cave (named after a hermit called Denis), we now know that Neanderthals who were closely related to their European kin reached the Altai Republic of Siberia.

  Shanidar I, the skull of a male Neanderthal found in the cave of Shanidar, Iraq. This individual had suffered substantial injuries, which had partially healed, suggesting that he had been cared for by others in the group. He was the inspiration for Creb, the disabled shaman in Jean M. Auel’s novel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980).

  Shanidar Cave in Iraq. A total of ten Neanderthal individuals have been discovered in this cave, dating to 70,000 to 40,000 years ago.

  It is ironic that as the Neanderthals headed towards extinction, they were also extending to their maximum range, and doing so in inhospitable areas such as Siberia while the global climate was trending colder. Shanidar is dated to 70,000–40,000 years ago, Teshik-Tash to the earlier end of this range and Okladnikov is carbon-dated (without using the modern technique of ultrafiltration) to over 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthals ultimately reached about the same distance of 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) along an east–west axis that Homo sapiens achieved on a north–south axis within the confines of Africa. As we will see in the next chapter, by the time of the later Neanderthal dates in Siberia, modern humans had not only left Africa but had worked their way through the Neanderthal homeland of Europe.

  The humanity of the Neanderthals was becoming increasingly evident in these Asian sites. Citing discoveries at Shanidar and Teshik-Tash, archaeologists started attributing the Neanderthals with human qualities such as compassion and sentimentality. Not all of the evidence has stood the test of time, but there remains plenty of support for the notion that Neanderthals shared many of the qualities that we once thought separated us from them.

  At Shanidar the remains of ten individuals (some buried, others apparently crushed by rock falls) were found in association with hearths, indicating that they lived, died and were sometimes buried in this location. One of these individuals, labelled Shanidar I, was severely disabled in life, judging by partially healed wounds that most likely came about through trauma. The fact that this individual survived debilitating blows to his arms, legs and head shows that he benefited from intensive support.

  Shanidar gained its initial fame from another individual, Shanidar IV. The excavators argued that Shanidar IV was intentionally buried and that the grave was adorned with a great heap of flowers. We discuss this burial again in Chapter Seven for its role in inspiring a particular literary image of the Neanderthals. The flower burial theory has since been dismissed, not just for the sheer implausibility of cut flowers being preserved in the archaeological record, but thanks to a better understanding of how pollen is preserved in ancient soil levels. In any case Shanidar I provides compelling evidence that the Neanderthals were a caring form of humanity.

  Sources of meat around Shanidar would have included wild sheep and goat which were native to this area. A site just outside the cave provides some of the world’s earliest evidence of domestication of these animals, which occurred during the modern human occupation of the Middle East in the Holocene. For modern humans, Shanidar is an important site in the development of civilization, while for Neanderthals it appears to have been an isolated outpost.

  At Teshik-Tash a child of no more than ten years of age was found in association with ibex horns in what first appeared to be one of the clearest Neanderthal ritual burials. Archaeologists now doubt whether this was a deliberate burial, noting that the child and the horns might have been dragged into the cave by hyenas. Taken together with the Neanderthal remains at Okladnikov and Denisova Caves, these two sites show that the Neanderthals could penetrate inhospitable conditions in the mountains of central Asia.

  Whether or not the child of Teshik-Tash was buried, it is fairly clear that the Neanderthal skeleton from Kebara, 60,000 years ago, was a deliberate burial. Coincidentally, this was within the time range that geneticists place the exodus out of Africa that brought about the Homo sapiens domination of the planet. What was going on in Asia in this period?

  Neanderthals were expanding their range to around double what it had been previously. They had been burying their dead much as modern humans were. And their brains continued to grow larger, with an individual from Amud dated to 45,000 years ago carrying over 1,740 ml (60 oz) of brain, which is at the extreme upper end of human variation.

  We now know that the human presence in Asia was far more complicated than previo
usly imagined. As Neanderthals pushed eastwards they may have encountered others who were there already. At Denisova Cave, Neanderthals were not the only species present in the Middle Paleolithic occupation, which dates back to over 125,000 years ago. Who else was living there? We know from DNA testing on a tooth and a fragment of a finger bone from the more recent layers that there were humans here who were outside the known genetic variation for both Neanderthals and modern humans. Archaeologists call this group the Denisovans.

  A Neanderthal skull from Amud, Israel, dating to around 45,000 years ago. It had the largest brain capacity of any early human ever found.

  At this stage it is not possible to say whether the Denisovans were a sort of eastern Neanderthal, an Asian descendant of Homo heidelbergensis, a relative of ‘Galilee Man’ (neither Neanderthal nor modern) from Zuttiyeh Cave in Israel, a separate migration out of Africa of early modern humans, or something else we have not considered. What is clear is that there were at least four kinds of human in Asia at this time – Neanderthals expanding eastwards, Homo sapiens coming out of Africa, Denisovans in Siberia and Homo floresiensis in Indonesia. In the next chapter we will consider evidence for interbreeding among these groups.

  Since the appearance of the Neanderthals, the first opportunity for different human species to meet in Asia had occurred at the beginning of the Eemian interglacial, when early modern humans first left Africa and Neanderthals spread eastwards. This early African exodus by Homo sapiens was not apparently successful, and as global temperatures returned to cold, glacial conditions, the Neanderthals had greater success in advancing across the world’s biggest continent.