Neanderthals not so human-like after all

Ohhh I will defo come back to this in the morrow AK. I've had a looong day, so sleep cries out to me now, but that will give me time enough…

Short answer; they're missing the point entirely IMH.

Linnaeus wrote: »

there must have been some cross-breeding between his kind and Homo Sapiens Sapiens; goodness, often on the bus or at the supermarket I come across beetle-browed types who might have stepped right out of a cavern!

True. Though I believe if we ever met a real Neandertal they'd really stand apart as different. We did interbreed with them alright and that evidence is still in our genes(up to 4% of non African folks DNA comes from them). It seems we did so more than once and in a few places too. Asians have different Neandertal genes compared to Europeans for example. That 4% survives down to today it must have been a relatively common event over time(it's higher in older modern human DNA. Otzi the Iceman has something like 6%). .

All joking aside, now: although Neanderthal did have a wider and longer braincase than modern man, his intellectual-creative capacity would seem to have significantly been more limited. There is no definite evidence that Neanderthal ever produced works of art for art's sake, or even utilitarian art objects, whereas Cro-Magnon from the very start was manufacturing attractive jewelry, sculpting amazingly aesthetic figures from ivory and lavishly decorating the walls of caves.

Oh certainly. One corner of a Cro Magnon cave would likely contain more art than all of previous human history put together. However Neandertals did collect and refine pigments of different colours(reds, blacks and shiny sparkles) for some purpose. One group in Italy selected for and collected black feathers from bird species they didn't appear to eat as food. There is some evidence that they may have had other body ornament like pendants and jewellery. They had an eye for symmetry as some very carefully worked hand axes show. Most such tools are well made for purpose but some are much more refined. I've an example myself from France which judging by size and design looks about 150,000 years old where the maker appears to have specifically worked the flint to centralise a hollow part(which may have originally held a fossil as flint often does).


He or she made many more hammer strikes and a lot more effort(and skill) on one side which is composed of much denser material compared to the other in what looks like an attempt to centralise the hollow. It's too shallow to work as a hafting/attachment point.

Personally I would believe that they weren't as culturally poor as has been believed in the past. However I would also believe that they weren't pretty much like us as some are suggesting in an attempt to make them more "human".* We definitely had something else. One type of art for which we'll probably never find evidence for(unless we find a frozen mummified Neandertal) is body art. Their pigments may have been for tattooing or body painting. Seems the most likely use. It may have been for reasons of camouflage, tribal association, status within the tribe. For territorial predators that might have started as a way to "mark their territory" like wolves scent marking and howling. That could have been the birthplace of art. It's not that big a leap to go from body art to "tattooing the skin" of a cave wall in your territory. The land is seen as a person/deity in many tribal and shamanistic religions. "Mother Earth" and all that. Quite a lot of the non figurative cave art of modern humans look like tribal tattoos.

A certain part of Neanderthal's brain...the part which stimulates creative curiousity, imagination and production...seems to have been underdeveloped or altogether missing in Neanderthal. This would have hampered his cultural development, and have put him at a disadvantage compared with the effervescent Cro-Magnon who effectively established the first kind of human CIVILIZATION, as opposed to mere community life.

In my opinion what hampered them far more was their relative isolation in the environment. A Neandertal Leonardo could have come along but a) may have been seen as odd because of their innate xenophobia and fear of the new, and/or b) even if they came up with great ideas only their small family tribe would know of them and once they died, all that would die with them.

There are modern humans not unlike this on the Andaman Islands. They are culturally very xenophobic, have been isolated for a very long time and not fond of new ideas at all. To the degree that alone among modern humans they don't know how to make fire, only store it as embers. Their art is extremely limited too and their stone tools not a patch on most modern human stuff.

With modern humans our larger groups and wider trade would mean ideas would have an "escape route" and far more chance of survival and propagation. Take what we're doing here now. Home computers were around for well over a decade and mostly a toy, used for games, of interest to hobbyists and business. The internet comes along and connects them all up and WHAM! Massive technological and social change. I'd see the human brain like the home computer in this example. Neandertals were PC's with a LAN a small home network, Modern humans were like PC's with a WAN the internet. The network is what makes the difference.

What is more, many palaeontologists are of the opinion that Neanderthal's vocal chords were not adapted to uttering human speech.

This I don't believe. They had a different throat anatomy(shorter), but not by much and they had a hyoid bone(that the vocal chords attach to) indistinguishable from modern people. They also had the same Fox P2 gene for speech as us. Plus given we had children together and raised them to adulthood I would be extremely surprised to find they had no speech. IMH Speech of some form has been part of us since Homo Erectus.

Adam Khor wrote: »

Would the onset of agriculture and sedentarism have something to do with this self-domestication? Or did it happen before that? Maybe they simply reached such numbers that they were safe from most predation by non-humans and so the genes of the smaller, weaker individuals started becoming more spread and eventually took over the big powerful types?

It seems to have been happening much earlier than farming. The weaker outbreeding the stronger must have been at play, some sort of sexual selection going on, but you'd wonder why. I mean we looked pretty much as we do now long before farming and larger settlements. Maybe being more juvenile as an adult increases your chances of raising children to adulthood and we selected more and more for that? Neandertals seemed to have had tragic levels of childhood mortality. The extension of play into adulthood by expanding the imagination also leads to innovation and again this would have been an advantage selected for. Over time these selected mental and cultural things would be reflected in the physical changes. EG heavy brow ridges that would come along with puberty would get smaller and smaller as women sexually selected for neotenous males with those mental traits?

Which makes me wonder, what do you think the temperament of Neanderthals would be like?

I'd suspect very full on people. Extremists of personality. Little quarter given on any emotion, good or bad. When aggressive, very aggressive, when affectionate, very affectionate(again not unlike wolves). Xenophobic, with a high degree of "not invented here" going on. Fear of novelty, strong traditionalists and pragmatists. Evidence for any of this? Their isolation in the landscape, their lack of obvious trade, pretty much every single adult male Neandertal so far found has suffered serious physical injury in life. Now some of this could be down to their hunting technique, but I suspect much of it was down to human on human action. On the other extreme we have examples of where injured individuals who would have been a drain on resources are cared for and looked after for years. The Old Man of Chapelle the perfect example. Barely a tooth in his head(rare back then, they usually have great teeth), riddled with arthritis, yet he was well nourished when he died and someone would have had to pre chew his food for him like a baby. Shanidar 1 from Iraq had lost part of his lower arm and had suffered a severe head injury, which likely left him blind in one eye with possible paralysis, both of which healed(though he would have been pretty disabled by them) and had been healed for at least a decade before he died. Another chap from the same cave shows evidence of a projectile wound that killed him. Because it was a projectile wound and Neandertals didn't use projectile weapons some have theorised one of us who were in the area at the time killed him. Though given the oldest throwing spears in the world are Neandertal and a couple of hundred thousand years before we showed up, who knows? I'm in two minds about if they buried their dead. I personally suspect if they did it was a one off rarity.

This is intriguing. Why? How do wolves know how to keep the balance? Is it culturally transmited? Instinctive?

I think it's just down to practicalities limiting them. The environment can only sustain a certain number of wolves and since they don't usually grow into huge marauding packs that could take down more and more prey over a wider area this keeps their numbers down. As do the next door neighbour wolves. They just naturally level out in numbers. In areas where food is scarce their territories are enormous, where food is more plentiful these territories shrink. It seems to be a self levelling system and common with other predators. IIRC T Rex were rare in the landscape and would have required huge territories and lots of food to sustain them. Same kinda thing.

Why? Is it the fact that dogs can live on a greater variety of food than wolves? Are wolves- despite their adaptability- too specialized on the hunt of large wild animals when compared to dogs?

Funny enough wolves are quite adaptable food wise. They have to be as they're not actually great big game hunters. The majority of hunts end in no prey at the end. They eat a lot of rodents for example. Hares, rabbits and smaller prey. But yea dogs can eat more variety. They adapted to more human foods as leftovers for a start. A dog biscuit would likely give a wolf a bad stomach.

It seems weird however that wolves dominate and even supress coyotes, for example, but don´t fare well against dogs. Don´t wolves eat lots of dogs in rural Russia for example?

Oh sure, but given time dogs will tend to win out. For a start they tend to be smaller and require less food and have a wider variety of foods they'll eat, they also and more importantly have more offspring more often. Wolves only come into season once per year.

(Speaking of wolves and Russia and one predator displacing another... did you see the news about the reintroduced Siberian tigress who took to hunting wolves to the point where the whole pack basically evacuated the area?
Apparently, even tho tigers and wolves coexist in parts of India, in Russia the tiger would actively supress wolf populations, forcing them to seek different territories. People in former tiger country saw wolves as strange newcomers when the tiger became endangered, and now that it's being reintroduced, the tiger is re-gaining its former spot as top predator...)

Interesting stuff AK. I hadn't heard of that. Makes sense mind you. Apex predators rarely get along in areas of high competition for resources. Maybe they get along in India because they're not selecting the same prey?




*Scientists in this area of early human study have a real tendency to only see what they want to see, to quite a surprising degree. Take stone tools. A couple of years ago in West Africa a site was found and excavated and the bold claim that this was the first known site where humans first made stone points and blades over 200,000 years ago(I think). This is now gospel. However if one looks at the actual study and drawings and photos of all the stone tools found, the so called "blades" and "points" make up a tiny fraction of the whole. Like hundreds of non blades with maybe twenty tools that look blade like. The Neandertal levalois technique of lithic production is another example. The gospel holds that this was a deliberate technique with an end point tool planned from the start. There are even different types described. Bit of a problem, as again the majority of both tools and the cores they come from show only the vaguest "plan". Indeed most cores are extremely random. IMHO the technique is simply the most efficient way to create many cutting edge tools from a lump of stone. Modern humans do come along and then we see a very definite "style" to tools, but outside of hand axes that's largely missing from previous humans. Cultural bias comes in too. EG early moderns in Africa are often found with cut marks on their bones. This is interpreted as "cultural" and maybe part of "ritual", yet when Neandertal bones are found with the same cut marks they're clearly cannibals...

Adam Khor wrote: »

Been trying to find a source... this is the pertinent excerpt from a book which was been quoted online:



I think the original research may be in this article but you have to pay to read it apparently:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v233/n5321/abs/233538a0.html

That's very interesting indeed. Hmmm. It would be interesting to see how many bones they examined from how many individuals, from where and over what periods of the Neandertals existence. There are more infant bones than adults in the records so that should be "easy" enough. I'd like to see if this varies geographically and/or over time. There were roughly three populations of Neandertals; western, France, Spain, UK, eastern into west Asia and guys and gals in the middle, I wonder do they all have this feature? Do the last of them have the same as the first of them?

Or does this feature mean the same thing in them as in chimps? Could there be another reason for it? EG for years it was assumed that the massively powerful forearms and left right disparity in use was down to thrusting stabbing spears. All very hairy chested macho caveman, but now it seems these muscles don't grow by that kind of action, instead they do grow from scraping hides to make leather.

They didn't all live in cold areas either. This image we have of them striding through the snow is pretty "Hollywood". Because they didn't have needles, it likely means fitted clothing was not an option for them, so their temperature range was actually lower than ours. The remains of their sites show this. They moved south pronto as the weather oscillated towards colder.

Still, every other normally hairless animal, the elephant, the rhino all went wooly in Europe, so it would seem logical for hominids to do so(until they invented fur they could take off or on as required). That was why I hung onto the furry idea.

That does beg the question of course, what were they doing with the pigments? They had to go out of their way to source them. Stone for tools was sourced locally, they tended not to travel far, but would make an exception for pigments. Lots of effort involved in grinding the pigments too.

The gaps in our knowledge are so wide. They worked leather and wood a lot. Most of their tools are for this purpose, but we've only the barest glimpse into what they were making. One site in Spain has preserved the cast of a wooden spatula type item. Very nicely made too.

As for their dexterity I'd be dubious of the claim that they were less dextrous than us. Going by their stone tools anyway. In some areas later on in their history they went thorugh a period of size reduction in tools and some of these are tiny. It would require great skill and accuracy in making such tools, never mind the power required to utilise them.

Linnaeus wrote: »

Well, if the illustration resembles the reality,

Possible, but unlikely. That particular illustrator tends to let his imagination run wild, which is OK, but…

The skull of the Red Deer "people" is really weird, too.

Yes it is L. They were a very odd looking people alright and lasted until around 10,000 years ago. They have extremely flattened faces, smaller brains on average and those cheek bones are crazy. Looks like Darth Vader from Star Wars. Some are suggesting they're the last of the Denisovans, others that they're Denisovan/Modern human mixes, some are convinced they're within the range of modern humans(Don't agree with that at all). I can't find anything about their toolkit as that would really help place them. If it's more primitive it says something, if it's more modern it says something else. I have found that kinda thing frustrating. It was the same with the Hobbits and these new guys they found recently in a cave South Africa.

Asia is somewhere where more humans are going to be dug up. Africa similarly. The science around hominid study was almost exclusively European based and biased at first. That's where the scientists were. Then some fossils showed up in Asia that were the most primitive so far found(Homo Erectus) and East Asia was seen as the "cradle of humanity" for a long while. Africa was largely ignored. Even though long before Darwin had suggested Africa as the likely birthplace of hominids for the simple reason it was the continent with our closest living relatives in the great apes. The chaps like Raymond Dart in South Africa were beating the drum for Africa as the cradle it wasn't really until the Leakeys started to find so much evidence back in the 60's and 70's that the focus went to Africa.

Even so, these days the story very basically goes that Erectus evolved in Africa, left there and went into Europe and Asia giving eventual rise to Neandertals in Eurasia. Before the Denisovans were found I was banging my own drum about Asia having "their" Neandertals and maybe more species of people. It made sense. In Europe we got Erectus Mark 2.0 in Neandertals, so over the same near million years we were supposed to believe that evolution in Asia with its huge variation in climate and landscape stood still? Africa came up with Erectus Mark 2.0 of its own; Us. Then we spread out and crossed with other peoples and continued to evolve to where I consider modern humans/Sapiens as Erectus Mark 2.1*. There's quite the gap in Africa between Erectus and early us. Much more to be found there I reckon(though the climate can be an issue for preservation).

What you say about decomposing corpses may be true; but I think it would have been easier for the Neanderthals to just dump the cadavers far outside the limits of their camp, than to go to the trouble of formally burying them…

The problem is that the evidence for Neandertals burying their dead in the first place is extremely thin and not at all sure. Every so called "burial" can be explained by natural processes and most Neandertals show zero evidence of burial, some, quite a few show strong evidence of cannibalism(well if food is short and it may have been ritualistic too). There was no use of ochre or grave goods. Two possible exceptions might be a female who was found in a cave under stones with a leopard paw and a scatter of stone tools with a male in an Iraqi site. Nothing like the funerary practices of the first moderns. We're very clear, with clearly defined pits, lots of grave goods and careful infilling of the site. Again when some Neandertals were found that appeared to be buried we assumed "ahh just like us". Big mistake. Even among modern people today funerary practices vary a lot, from burial in the ground to "sky burial" where corpses are left outside to the elements and scavengers, to burial and then exhumation, to cremation, even cannibalism.

Take the first so called "burial" found and dsicribed, that of the "Old man of La Chapelle". He was found in a tiny cave in a foetal position with knees drawn up in what looked like a shallow pit that was later covered rapidly because he wasn't disturbed by scavengers. No grave goods. Looks like a burial alright, but… He was an old man. Maybe in the middle of a winter storm he crawled into this tiny cave( I've seen this cave for myself. It is teeny tiny. A cavelet, a baby cave. ), tried to get low in the natural depression and then died from the cold(his death position is common among climbers who die from hypothermia). Because it was winter and the entrance of the cave is maybe a metre from where he lay, snow drifts could have covered him. This would have stopped his scent from being picked up by animals and come the spring and the melt water the cave ceiling may have given way and he was buried(it was almost full of material when first discovered).

Actually I still hold out the tiniest maybe that this guy might be a deliberate burial and for an odd reason I've not read elsewhere. The lack of grave goods. Yep. If he was an old hunter out on his own he would have the tools of his trade with him. OK a wooden spear would have long decayed, but flint blades? Unlikely. That's why I think the Iraqi "grave goods" aren't. The guy died in a cave in with his toolkit about his person. We might see grave goods as valuables in the afterlife, they may not have had an idea of an afterlife(some modern tribes today don't) and burying useful tools would have been seen as a waste of resources. This might explain the cannibalism too. Another explanation for the Old Man might be that he died in that cave in winter, was discovered by his people later on, his tools and the like taken and him buried rather than eaten out of some respect(and the meat may have gone off). Mad theory yea, but it's got just as much if not more evidence than deliberate ritual burial.

As for Palaeolithic clothing: I think that both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon must have known how to manufacture basic needles and to utilise plant fibres as thread.

It seems not. Neandertals didn't have needles. They had borers and awls but needles no. Interestingly they didn't utilise worked bone as a tool material, which is odd as it would seem an obvious choice of material. Worked bone comes very late to the human table. Something that really puzzles me. I mean they had the bones of animals they ate and they used the skins as leather, they may have used the bones as a primitive building material for teepees and lean to's, but didn't think a splintered bone was useable? I mean, one of the first tools the first hominids made was to break bones to get at the marrow, but it took two million years to see the sharp bones left over as useful? They did have string, sinew being the obvious one as it is much stronger than most plant fibre and tightens as it dries and they had lots of it. Neandertals even had a complex compound "superglue" that took incredible skill and knowledge to produce, but needles nope.

They lived in severe Ice Age temperatures where the only real warmth would have been provided by heavy fur garments, covering all parts of the body including the head. In order to attach hoods, sleeves, pants legs etc., some kind of sewing is necessary.

That's the thing, as I said before the picture of Neandertals living in polar conditions like caveman Eskimo is not an accurate one. Neandertals stayed well below the snow line, at worst tundra conditions and mostly northern European temperate conditions of today. Indeed what is notable about Cro Magnon folks is they have more northerly ranges because of needles and fitted clothing, even though they were a thinner more warm adapted species.



*IMHO the "Hobbits" may not be dwarf Homo Erectus, but an even more primitive species, like an evolved Australopithecus (Lucy) and that erectus weren't the first to migrate from Africa. Pigeons, insert cat. ;-D