The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  Combining these lines of evidence, a picture has emerged of the Neanderthals as top predators, consuming huge amounts of meat, particularly from large mammals such as woolly mammoths. They also consumed horse, red deer, reindeer and bison. A wealth of habitation sites in France – most notably Combe Grenal (Dordogne), which was excavated by François Bordes in the 1950s and 1960s and which has 13 metres (40 ft) of occupation levels dating from more than 125,000 years ago to less than 50,000 years ago – has shown that Neanderthals were primary butchers (i.e. they did not scavenge animals killed by other predators) and they selected prey from throughout herds, rather than selecting the weak. There has been a long debate over this issue, led on one side by Lewis Binford, who argued that the Neanderthals were simple scavengers. There is no doubt that Neanderthals did scavenge for food, but the view of the Neanderthals as expert hunters has lately come to predominate.

  A new kind of evidence has emerged more recently, showing that the Neanderthals ate more than just meat. The anthropologist Karen Hardy studied chemicals in the plaque of Neanderthal teeth from El Sidrón on the north coast of Spain, and found evidence that they were eating roasted vegetables and consuming chamomile, possibly for medicinal purposes. A similar study of teeth from Shanidar, Iraq, and Spy, Belgium, showed evidence for the consumption of plants, including wild grains. This diet is much more varied than that implied by the isotope data alone, although it does not contradict the notion that Neanderthals were heavily meat-dependent.

  For archaeologist Clive Gamble, ‘The isotope revolution has cut out all the endless speculation about scavenging and hunting and returned the verdict they were top predators, albeit ones who did not eat much fish, something that the earliest moderns in Europe did.’ The consumption of fish has emerged as perhaps the greatest dietary contrast that Neanderthals had with the Homo sapiens that replaced them in Europe.

  There is one part of Europe where the climate, environment and food resources were vastly different from areas such as France where we have built up this picture of Neanderthals as serious meat eaters. We refer to the area called a ‘Mediterranean Serengeti’ by Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum, who has spent more than a decade studying Gorham’s Cave (pp. 66–67) and other Neanderthal sites in Gibraltar. Finlayson argues that the food available to Neanderthals in Spain in this period was more diverse than the food they found in the heart of Europe.

  The Neanderthals in Gibraltar, from the Eemian interglacial until their extinction, ate rabbit along with grazers such as ibex and red deer. In addition they consumed mussels, limpets, cockles, tortoises, monk seals and, incredibly, dolphins. Like their modern human counterparts in Africa, their consumption of molluscs goes back to the earliest levels, perhaps before the Eemian. Sites from around the Mediterranean and the Near East show similarities with Spain in that the Neanderthals were eating small game such as red deer, along with tortoises, seafood and plants.

  Recall from Chapter Five that early modern humans in Africa seem to have made their great behavioural leap forward in a coastal environment, and there is a wealth of key sites in Morocco and South Africa. Homo sapiens at the time seemed to recognize the importance of the sea, as some of the world’s first symbolic behaviour involved the creation of jewelry out of mollusc shells. It is certainly possible that Homo sapiens were the beneficiaries of the particular geography of Africa, with its long coastlines adjacent to grasslands that supported herds of game.

  In contrast, the geography of Europe is such that the main coastal areas were in less productive areas in the south. The Mediterranean coast is also less productive than the South African coast where some of the earliest modern behaviours appeared. In Spain, at least, the Neanderthals were learning to exploit the coast and take advantage of its rich resources. The problem is that as part of the Iberian Peninsula, the coast of Spain is limited, and the Pyrenees, especially in colder times, acted as a barrier to the rest of Europe. The Neanderthals were more or less locked into an area only a small fraction of the size of coast that Homo sapiens exploited in Africa. There is evidence that Neanderthals consumed shellfish in Italy too, but as in Spain they were not able to expand their numbers or range in a significant way.

  Some researchers argue that the Neanderthals were doing more than harvesting seafood in the Iberian Peninsula. Some of the fiercest debates about Neanderthal capabilities have revolved around the question of symbolism and have been focused on this same area. Neanderthals used red ochre from as far back as 250,000 years ago. But there is little evidence that they built substantially on this use of dye. Finlayson and others have argued that in Gibraltar and other areas Neanderthals were plucking feathers and removing talons from inedible birds such as eagles, possibly for ornamental purposes. More controversially, the Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão has argued that Neanderthals were experimenting with cave art and creating paints of different colours. While it is far from clear whether Neanderthals did make the leap to symbolic behaviour, it seems that if they did, this phenomenon, like fishing, was not widespread.

  Can we say that Neanderthal bodies or diet were key factors in their extinction? Before we can answer this question, we must first look at the impact of the arrival of Homo sapiens.

  Enter the Aurignacians

  El Castillo Cave in Cantabria, Spain, has some of the oldest cave art in the world in the form of a series of red dots and hand stencils (see p. 139), made by blowing paint on a hand held against the wall in order to create an outline. In 2012 some of these red dots at El Castillo and at ten other sites in the region were dated to more than 40,000 years ago. Also in 2012 bone flutes and portable art such as human figurines, some with animal heads, from the site of Geissenklösterle, Germany, were dated to more than 42,000 years ago. Similar art from other sites in the Swabian Jura, such as Hohle Fels, are dated to almost that old.

  For many years carbon dating could not produce reliable dates approaching 40,000 years ago. With the introduction of the technique called ultrafiltration, however, there has been a great improvement in reliability. Now it is possible to carbon date smaller samples. This limits the effect of contaminants in the form of more recent carbon isotopes, which can make organic material appear to be much younger than it is. The smaller samples also mean that museum curators are more likely to allow direct dating on human bones, because the destruction is more limited.

  A similar revolution has taken place in U-series dating. With less destruction caused in the collection of small samples, it is now possible to use the U-series technique – which can go beyond the limits of carbon dating – to date cave paintings. Thanks to ultrafiltration and the new U-series dating, much of the first portable and cave art in Europe, and possibly the world, has been pushed back in time.

  Some archaeologists have pointed out that if this early art is really more than 40,000 years old, then there is a possibility, however remote, that the Neanderthals were behind it. For Chris Stringer, one of the biggest surprises in his career so far has been the ‘recent evidence of the [Neanderthals’] use of pendants, pigments and adhesives to make composite tools’. We must be prepared for a further surprise that the Neanderthals may also have used pigments to create decorative red dots and hand stencils on cave walls. Unless earlier dates are established for this simple cave art, however, it does seem like too much of a coincidence that it appeared at a time when there were other major developments afoot in Europe which were not restricted to art production but involved a host of new behaviours and technologies.

  The suite of changes seen in Europe from just before 40,000 years ago constitutes an industry known as the Aurignacian, from the name of a cave in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. Paul Mellars has named six elements which together comprise the Aurignacian and distinguish it from the Mousterian, the industry that had been favoured by the Neanderthals since 250,000 years ago. These are: (1) improved blade production using soft-hammer percussion (see our discussion of stone tools in Chapter Four); (2) more sophisti
cated stone tools with an emphasis on blades; (3) the use of tools made of bone, antler and ivory as well as stone; (4) ornaments (shell beads); (5) art; and (6) expanded trade networks.

  A flute made from a bird bone found at Geissenklösterle, Germany, and dated to more than 42,000 years ago, signalling the arrival in Europe of modern humans.

  The appearance of the Aurignacian represents such a radical departure from the preceding 200,000-plus years of Mousterian toolmaking that archaeologists mark this moment as the end of the Middle Palaeolithic and the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic period. This change is also conventionally seen as the end of the Neanderthals and the beginning of the time of modern humans. The actual transition is fuzzier than that, and the question of whether Neanderthals were capable of creating Upper Palaeolithic tools has been fundamental to the debate over their cognitive capabilities.

  With the exception of a few dissenters, such as the Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão, who believe that Neanderthals made some of the advances associated with the Aurignacian on the eve of the arrival of Homo sapiens, most researchers credit the entire suite of Aurignacian behaviours to newly arrived modern humans. Who were these Homo sapiens and how did they get to Europe?

  The sudden and widespread appearance of modern humans in Europe over 40,000 years ago requires some explanation. As archaeologists try to trace the spread of Homo sapiens around the world, perhaps the most important line of evidence to emerge in recent years comes from DNA. Though there seems to be a great deal of variation among human populations outside of Africa, the DNA tells a different story, which reveals that most current human variation can be found within Africa. In contrast, the rest of the global population is descended from a founder group that could have been as small as just a few hundred individuals.

  Archaeologists and geneticists are still working out the details of this extraordinary story of global colonization. Consensus is building that a main African exodus event occurred around 80,000 to 55,000 years ago, either across the Bab-el-Mandeb (‘Gate of Grief’), roughly from modern Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, or alternatively around the rim of the Red Sea. From that point the spread around the world occurred with incredible speed. Humans reached Australia near the 55,000-year lower estimate for the start of the dispersal.

  What accounts for the rapid spread to Australia in contrast to the time it took modern humans to reach Europe? Even today the shoreline has retained a central place in the social and economic lives of Homo sapiens. It is a place of recreation and seafood harvesting. As an essentially one-dimensional geographic zone (a thin line between scrub and shore), it lends itself to safe forward exploration (one can always double back) and social gatherings. For beachcombing pioneers coming out of Africa, one can imagine it as a very long spring break holiday lasting thousands of years, where each generation could move a little further along the coast into empty land.

  A population expanding around the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula could have reached India and beyond quite quickly. The coastal route to Australia, despite its long distance in absolute terms, is easier ground to cover than the route inland. Of course, not everyone stayed on the beach. The pioneers who made their way to Europe could have come by any of a number of routes – directly north from Yemen, through the Fertile Crescent in Iraq or via a more circuitous path. Most of these routes would have brought them to Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, where they would have discovered the Danube as a sort of prehistoric European superhighway to central Europe (another essentially one-dimensional geographic zone), exactly where some of the earliest European art has been found.

  At the gateway to Europe, the earliest modern human sites are Oase Cave, Romania, which was discovered in 2002, and nearby Temnata Cave and Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. More controversially, carbon dating with ultrafiltration on modern human teeth from old excavations has given dates of more than 41,000 years ago for Kents Cavern, Torquay, in England (Britain was then accessible by a land bridge), and more than 43,000 years ago from Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, Italy.

  A fairly complete Homo sapiens skull from Oase has a curious blend of modern and archaic features. Similarly, jaw bones from Bacho Kiro have been the subject of debate as to their categorization. These bones have led some to argue that the first modern humans to reach Europe had already intermixed with archaic humans, possibly with Neanderthals in the Middle East. Others see these bones as falling within modern human variability. As in so many of these cases of ambiguous attributions of human bones, the arguments can be heated at times. To confuse matters further, new evidence is coming into play thanks to cutting-edge techniques to extract ancient DNA from bones – more on that later in this chapter.

  What is clear is that the cultural explosion that goes by the name Aurignacian is associated with the intrusion of modern humans into Europe. And this brings us to the next suspect in our list of possible causes of the Neanderthals’ demise. Did the Aurignacians wipe them out? The key to answering this question is to look at population patterns through time. Let us start with the coast of south-eastern Europe, which is sometimes proposed as a possible route into the continent by Aurignacian pioneers. Dimitra’s post-doctoral research addressed exactly this question. The evidence for overlap between Mousterian and Aurignacian populations can be challenging. At many sites there is extensive mixing from different time periods, and collections from a single level may have accumulated over tens of thousands of years. Researchers tended to use non-committal terms for mixed Mousterian/Aurignacian archaeological sites, calling them Terminal Middle Palaeolithic, Transitional Middle/Upper Palaeolithic, Initial Upper Palaeolithic or Early Upper Palaeolithic. All these terms amounted to the same thing, which is that the collections of stone tools were not easily classified as Mousterian (and probably Neanderthal) or Aurignacian (and probably modern human).

  Dimitra argued that the youngest radiometric dates associated with Mousterian tools, from such sites as Mujina Pećina, Croatia, and Lakonis Cave, Greece, place them at more than 40,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the earliest Aurignacian sites from the region were dated to just 37,500 years ago. To Dimitra this indicated that the mixed tool collections were not evidence for overlap. She argued instead that the Aurignacian culture may have arrived late on the Balkan coast. By then the local Neanderthal population had been long gone, and the region had been empty of human habitation.

  Is this pattern of hiatus between Neanderthal departure and modern human arrival observable elsewhere? In the Caucasus Mountains, the Neanderthal infant at Mezmaiskaya Cave, Russia, was once thought to be a late Neanderthal survivor at around 35,000 years old. In 2011, however, the infant was re-dated to about 40,000 years ago, before modern humans arrived in the area. The Caucasus region is now considered to have been devoid of Neanderthals by the time modern humans arrived there. The ultrafiltration revolution in carbon dating is pushing many late Neanderthals to earlier than 40,000 years ago, throwing new doubt on the question of overlap between the two species in Europe.

  Another region to be a subject of debate is Italy. A localized stone tool tradition in southern Italy known as Uluzzian has long been considered ‘transitional’ from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, basically because it is not Mousterian and not Aurignacian, and the hominin bones associated with it were not definitely categorized as Neanderthal or modern human. The Uluzzian is known for having crescent-shaped knives with extensive retouching. No one could say for sure whether the toolmakers were Neanderthals who had ‘progressed’ from the Mousterian, or modern humans who had not yet achieved the full Aurignacian suite of technologies, so ‘transitional’ seemed to cover it.

  Until recently the conventional wisdom was that the Uluzzian represented a limited adaptation of Neanderthals to Upper Palaeolithic tool forms with which they had come in contact. But in 2011 two teeth at the Uluzzian site of Grotta del Cavallo – the first Uluzzian site identified in the 1960s – were identified as modern human and, as we mention above, date
d to more than 43,000 years ago. While some dispute these dates, the Uluzzian is now considered by many to be a modern human tool tradition, and this has removed the evidence that Neanderthals survived in Italy well after the appearance of modern humans elsewhere in Europe. Italy now seems like a mosaic, with the Uluzzian and Aurignacian (probably modern humans) and Mousterian (probably Neanderthals) in different regions at different times.

  Excavation at Mujina Pećina Cave, Croatia.

  While there are continuing disputes over new technologies and particular dates, it is widely accepted that Neanderthals and modern humans shared Europe from the modern human arrival around 45,000 years ago until the Neanderthals’ extinction. But this does not mean that they were together for that whole time in all places. New dates and new dating techniques are appearing with great frequency, and the continental picture is rapidly changing. With that caveat in mind, what we can say is that the Neanderthals had already retreated from many areas well in advance of the arrival of modern humans. But this was not necessarily true everywhere.

  There is, in fact, some overlap between the Mousterian and Aurignacian (and presumably Neanderthal and modern human) occupation in northern Spain and in France. As the dating is refined, the period of overlap has gone down in researchers’ estimates from as much as 10,000 years to perhaps just a few thousand years.

  There is little consensus over the nature of interaction between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in these areas. Some claim that over thousands of years the two populations were so small and the population densities so low, perhaps as little as one person per 100 square kilometres (40 sq. miles), that they may have missed one another. For others, their direct interactions were likely to have been frequent. Until recently there was a widespread belief that at least one group of Neanderthals in southern France became ‘acculturated’ to the Upper Palaeolithic technology of their modern human neighbours. This group is associated with an industry known as the Châtelperronian, which has long been at the centre of debate over the Neanderthals’ cognitive abilities.