The Neanderthal Thread

If this proves the right age and not a natural formation and the evidence of fire seems to rule that out, then this is effin huge AK.

I've long held the personal belief they had "art" and human culture, but a very different one to ours, an internal, human canvas based one. Musing on their apparently strong xenophobia and evidence of violence in their bones that may have come from territorial disputes, got me thinking that just like wolves in a landscape they needed to mark territorial boundaries and show group affiliations at some distance and/or in low light levels.

Body art is one way of doing this. So in an area you might have the manganese black chests, the ochre red faces and the lime white arms. Groups could see and recognise the "other" at enough of a distance so wasteful internecine struggles could be kept to a minimum. There would be quite a selective pressure for better representations of group affiliation, so it might evolve over time. This might also explain why the use of predator bird bones and feathers is only found in one small group in Italy. It's an isolated case, not necessarily because only one group uniquely came up with it, but it was their groups affiliation signal, so would make no sense for other groups in the area to copy it. That would defeat its very purpose.

The problem with this kinda stuff is it doesn't fossilise so well. If at all. Go to a body modification convention today and you will see amazing body art in the form of tattoos, scarification, piercings, but without modern methods of recording such things, when the owners leave us, so does their art. If the Maori had been wiped out by some natural disaster before outsiders recorded their body art in sketches and descriptions the world would have known of their skills as carvers, but of their body art culture all would be lost.

This may also explain why when modern humans get to Eurasia our art really kicks off. We may have been mimicking them, not the other way around. We're far less xenophobic so it may not have been much of a pressure for us. Then we make the leap to art of the external. Where we mark the body of the ground as well as ourselves. That was our innovation. Until this site came along… Yeah huge alright. Can't wait to read more.

That is now added to my desktop background pics. Thanks head, I've been trawling the web to find that in a high res version and as per usual AK to the rescue.

Because for a nice change I got in ahead of AK, I posted the findings on *ahem* another forum hereabouts(they use trowels and watch TimeTeam tutting throughout ), but for your delectation, or need for a soporific, here are my usual longwinded witterings from there...

And it predates modern humans... A study published in Science has determined through dating of the carbonate overlay that cave art found in three separate Spanish sites is at least 64,000 years old. One handprint comes in at 66,000 years old. This predates the known appearance of modern humans in Europe* by about 20,000 years, so it follows it would have to have been produced by Neandertals.


An example of one artwork.

They suggest that other sites in Europe where similar art is found and has always been thought to be the oldest of modern human work might also be of Neandertal origin.

Another study published yesterday looked at pierced and "painted" shells and pigments in another Spanish cave and concluded that at 115-120,000 years old they predate any modern human symbolic material so far found by 20,000 years(Blombos Cave South Africa).

Added to the stone "circles" discovered in France dating to 175,000 years old it seems symbolism and abstract thought wasn't just our preserve.



Maybe our great modern human explosion of art around 40-50,000 years ago mostly centred within Europe was because of contact with Neandertals and an "arms race" of symbolism kicked off, a race we won. And we may have won it because of one serious advantage over them; we were less tribal, less xenophobic. One group of Neandertals might have made "art" but it was a symboliser of that particular group, so it would make no sense for another group to copy that. EG we have evidence of eagle talon and feather jewellery in one group in Italy, but nothing like that anywhere else. In the Channel Islands there were two groups of Neandertals living beside each other and no evidence of any trade at all.

One incredible feature of our symbolism and a feature rarely pointed out is that in the earliest days of it and across a huge swathe of land from the Mediterranean through France and Germany to the alps it's the same. The same cave art, the same portable art(Venus' and the like). It's one set of cultural reference points. An Austrian could well have understood the symbolism, maybe even the language of a Spaniard. They also traded within this corridor across the same distances.

As modern history has shown when one such cohesive homogenised culture comes up against localised and isolated cultures the latter get swamped. Maybe they went extinct not because of war, or disease or better tools, but because we out arted them? It's certainly another selective pressure worth considering.





*Known appearance is the thing here. I personally suspect modern humans could have made earlier forays into Europe. It seems they got as far as Australia around 65,000 years ago. The first cave art site might well have been one such very early European foray. I'd be more sure of Neandertal authorship if similar older dates came back from more northerly sites that didn't show associated modern human material until much later. The French stone structures can't be doubted however. At 170,000 years old they couldn't be modern human in origin.

Adam Khor wrote: »

As always, interesting stuff. 
And now that we're talking about hands, I'm wondering about feet. As I understand it Neanderthal footprints do show major differences with ours? 
* how will you convince them to do what you want, tho?

I dunno AK. I'm not aware of any foot tracks of Neandertals so far found. On the physical front their feet were pretty much within the ranges of our own. Broader and stouter than average today, with a larger heel, but there would be a few people in modern populations that would have similar feet.

Their most divergent differences were mostly concentrated above the neck, where they showed major differences. Their skull was more rugby ball shaped, whereas ours is more football shaped. They had bigger teeth, no chin to speak off, swept back cheekbones and a much more pronounced forwardly biased mid face. And bigger noses. Below the neck, we see differences in that their rib cage didn't pinch in to a waist, but rather flared out and their bones were far more robust and stocky. Hands and feet at least on the surface looked very similar to ours.

Adam Khor wrote: »

probably most likely a vulture or a lammergeier scavenging the remains.

That would be my thinking too.

A new study on the Neandertal ribcage has discovered subtle differences in how they compared to us.

From the time of their discovery they were seen as a hunched over "brute", mostly down to the first skeleton found who was very old and riddled with arthritis, with a side order of a superiority complex on our parts. Since then we've realised(though quite recently) that they were just as upright and normal looking as us. Likely because when we found out we were related...

Anyway, even though we have found more of them than any other hominid besides ourselves, all Neandertal finds are fragmentary to one degree or other. Ribs in particular tend not to preserve so easily. Luckily one lad in Israel, from Mt Carmel to be precise did leave us with a near complete ribcage(and hyoid bone). Known today by the title of Kebara 2.



Our Keb, was a lad of about 30 when he died. His legs are missing, as is his skull*, but he left us with a great torso. Great arms too.

The heel of the hunt seems to be that rather than being hunched and with bent backs, they were actually more straight backed than us, with less of a curve in the lower back going on, so likely would have suffered less with back trouble for a start. Their ribcage also supported larger lungs and larger diaphragm so would have been likely more efficient in breathing compared to us too. This impacts on the idea that they weren't as good walkers as us. They certainly don't look great for running, unlike our longer legged narrower hipped tropical body shape, but they might have been pretty good distance walkers, and maybe short burst sprinters.

As far as body shape goes, this idea of them being muscle bound bruisers, people who were much "stockier" than us(the article notes this) IMHO is wrong, or at least debatable. Yes their bones show much more torsional stress from their powerful muscles(along with extremely fine motor skills, so powerful and precise), but that doesn't mean they had to look like this:



The thing is that extreme of modern human musculature wouldn't have the strength of an 18 year old Neandertal woman and no way would she look close to that. Look at our closest loving relative, the chimpanzee. Chimps are extremely strong, much stronger than us, yet they don't look like a bodybuilder. They're more "wiry" and I reckon Neandertals were similar. Slightly broader chests and muscles, but not so different to us, at least the us that were around and met them at the time.






*just had a thought... He's not the only one found that was relatively intact, including the lower jaw, but minus the skull. And a couple where only the skull has been found.. Hmmm. Could it be that the skull was sometimes purposely removed for veneration or some other cultural purpose?

Adam Khor wrote: »

Interesting, but wait... wasn´t it already known that their ribcage was shaped differently? I remember seeing a reconstructed skeleton of a Neanderthal side by side with a H. sapiens, and the different ribcage shape was among the first things that struck the eye. Unless of course that was just infered from other parts of the body or something and this just confirms it?

Oh we knew their ribcage flared more at the bottom compared to ours, but this study found it was more than a slight flare and had functional differences too. IE they relied more on using their diaphragm for breathing, rather than expansion of the ribcage. Larger lung capacity too. It also found that their spine was a different shape, more upright, with less of a curve to it than ours. The researchers say this was more stable a setup, though I had always heard we have a curve to the lower spine because that acts more like a spring and makes the spine less prone to damage?

My personal take from this would be that diaphragm breathing required a larger lung capacity and along with the straighter spine made them less efficient for long distance running. Maybe they made for good short distance sprinters and lungers? Whereas our smaller, lighter ribcage and lungs, using both diaphragm and chest expansion, along with our S shaped spines made us built for middle and long distance running.

If you look at modern track athletes, the 100 metre sprinters are generally far more muscular in build than middle and long distance runners. The latter's torsos and arms drive them forward.

Depends how close he was.

It seems they might have been built for ambush attacks, spring from cover, get in close with stabbing spears and hang on. Their weapons were built(at least in their latter years) with short distance in mind. Ours were built for distance, throwing spears and darts. In dense brush or forest theirs is the better strategy. Throwing weapons are almost guaranteed to hit a branch along the way, so their distance advantage is lost. Maybe they also operated more in low light dusk/dawn, what with their bigger eyes and larger area of the visual cortex. They took down prey like horses and deer like this. Both of which could outrun any human.

So they sound like they could have been pretty explosive in speed over short distances with the element of surprise. I'd reckon a modern human could escape on foot, if they got a warning and weren't within that killing zone. If they were and with their superior physical strength it would have been game over for one of us. Now on more open ground the advantage was reversed. We didn't have to get close to them, we could strike them down at a distance.

Indeed one Neandertal that was found in present day Iran may have been felled by a distance weapon as a small flint point was found lodged in his rib IIRC and it had followed a downward trajectory. Stabbing spears have larger points and the trajectory is horizontal. And since they didn't use such distance weapons, it looks like one of us fired at him, likely with an atlatl propelled by a spear thrower .



One of those is accurate out to a hundred metres. You can also lay down a volley of them. It's not just a one shot deal like a stabbing spear.

IIRC he didn't die from this as healing had begun. Instead he was killed by a cave roof fall. They were a very tough people.

They also had to deal with the European Cave Bear.



And they were shorter than 1.8 metres. In my collection hoard of weird tat I have a fragment of a Romanian Cave Bear's lower jaw.



That measures left to right just over 16 Cm and the tooth is just over 5 Cm. Two inches in old money. And that's an adolescent.

Neandertal remains and tools have often been found in close proximity to Cave Bears. This led some in the early to mid 20th century to smoke some quality weed posit a "Cave Bear Cult" among Neandertals. A combination of bad, sometimes scarily amateur hour fieldwork(and from top experts in the field with it) and dodgy supposition and a touch of romance. Even popular fiction in books and film lapped it up. EG the bestsellers and following flic; "Clan of the Cave Bear" is based on it(there was a remake and possible series shot in Ireland a few years, back. Came to nought). Total nonsense, or at least not even half a shred of evidence links the two culturally. I can't recall if there's any evidence of physical interaction at all between humans, us and Neandertals and Cave Bears. They simply shared similar living spaces.

Well... not so much. For a start "Cave" Bears are so named because so many were found in caves. Because they used them for hibernation in the winter, and so many died during it, from disease, old age, or not enough reserves built up in summer. The rest of the year they were like... well, Bears. Which is grand enough if you're a feckin huge bear.

Plus Neandertals, or us for that matter, weren't "cavemen". We both used the entrances of caves and similar overhangs for sheltered living quarters, reserving the caves themselves for more cultural religious purposes. Paintings and sculptures, likely religious or group ceremonies, that sorta thing. We did probably deserve more of the descriptor of "cave" than the bears did, to be fair. Well we had fire for a start, so we could see our way. When you look at deep caves with human and animal presences over millennia like Chauvet for example, note the footprints. The bears, wolves or whatever animals ventured in, did so by following the cave walls. Of course, they couldn't see in the total dark of a cave(and if you've ever been in a cave and switch off the lights, you will feel a dark you've never felt before).

On that note, in Chauvet and a cave in Romania IIRC, there is debate over footprints of a modern human and a canine. Are they contemporaneous? Did the wolf follow the modern human, a kid in both cases, about 12/13 and do him/her in? Is this a domestic pet or something else? One night after a few ales, I had a look at the pics of the prints and one thing leapt out: They were mostly in the middle of the cave and walked into the cave mostly down the centre, with some exploration in the bigger chambers. Both of them could see. IMHO it was a young lad or lass with their doggie/early domesticated wolf having an oul explore as kids and dogs will, probably against their parents permission. And both were snapshots of time well over 20,000 years BC.

Nice bit of practical archaeology, but Neandertals have little enough to do with it. The spears in question are around 400,000 years old, the classical Neandertal doesn't show up until around 200-300,000 years ago. A lot can happen in that time. For example I've read for years now that Neandertal shoulder joints were different to ours, more rigid and with slightly less movement that would affect throwing as an action(it's a compromise with us and the same extra mobility in the joint increases the risk of rotator cuff injury).

Their tribes seem to generally quite small, akin to wolves. Small family groups with a pair of adults, maybe some older adults and then kids and mostly with defined territories. Against that are the deliberately built stone circles set deep in a French cave. That would have required a larger group, or maybe not? I suspect that trend also changed over time. In one period you have the small familial groups, in others, slightly larger, but nowhere near as large as our groups became and with almost no evidence of much inter-group trade going on.

Adam Khor wrote: »

What prevented them from becoming more numerous, tho?)

They were apex predators which in simple terms they pretty much always stay quite rare in the landscape. IE for every T-rex you needed x thousands of prey animals in their territory. Now that can shift with population increases, change in predator diets(increase of prey choices), migrations into new territory etc, but generally speaking it stays pretty stable.

We Modern Humans were/are the odd one out as predators go. We tend to be a bit like locusts in that we can often strip an area of resources. Consider that in the many hundreds of thousands of years of Neandertals and previous folks like them, no indications of any mass extinctions have been found, yet when we come along you can pretty accurately track our progress across the world by the appearance of mass extinctions.

We also seem to be more gregarious, more social and build much larger groups of people, not just small family groups that they had. Larger groups mean more trade and more people available to exploit resources(and less inbreeding).

We also tended to have much wider food choices, so when large prey animals go extinct we can fall back on other food resources. We also needed fewer calories to survive. Now more recently this has been challenged by findings that showed Neandertals could also exploit more resources. And that's true, but if you note where they do this, it's usually towards the end of their time on the planet and at the edge of their previous territories that had been taken over by us. IE places like Gibraltar. The folks there have about the widest range of exploited foods of any Neandertals. And it looks like they were the last pocket of them as a distinct people(so far found).

The narrative usually goes that they dwindled in numbers until there was only one or two left and that was that. I suspect that we came along when there were only a few left and... well maybe we just killed them, but humans can be as much altruistic as violent so there's a hope in me that maybe we took them in and the last of them passed into history surrounded by us.

What's sobering to think is that back then the sea was much lower and the base of Gibraltar had a large Eden like plain in front of it full of food and the coast of Africa was much closer. On clear nights they would surely have been able to see across that narrow strait the campfires of the people who would replace them.