Neanderthal Read online

  Tentative reconstructions sketched by the discoverers of the Spy remains.

  In 1889 work began at a site called Krapina in Croatia which was, over some fifteen years, to yield up the remains of between two and three dozen Neanderthal individuals, with further stray finds up to about 1970, including those of several children. Fossil animal bones had already been found there in the course of quarrying for sand and a human tooth came to light as soon as proper excavations were begun. The excavations were conducted along first-class lines for the time, producing bones of extinct animals, Mousterian tools, much evidence of the use of fire over long periods of human occupation, and human bones of the Neanderthal type. The Zagreb professor who conducted the work began as a follower of Virchow, relegating the Neanderthal and la Naulette remains to pathological status, but the many bones he turned up at Krapina convinced him that he was dealing with a natural population of human beings who were simply different from modern men in some respects. (Interestingly, the Krapina Neanderthalers were perhaps not quite as very distinctively Neanderthal as others found to date, having in some cases, for example, more rounded backs to their skulls and other less than fully Neanderthal features.) It was Professor Gorganovič-Kramberger of Zagreb who really gave impetus to the idea of cannibalism among the Neanderthalers; it had been mooted before on the basis of the broken jaw of la Naulette, but the excavator of Krapina was faced with a mass of disarticulated and scattered bones, with the long bones split open (for marrow?), many of them those of juveniles, some of them burned. He concluded that these abused bones represented the remains of victims of cannibal practices, presumably on the part of others of their kind. (Others were to propose further that these Neanderthalers had been the Untermenschen losers in a struggle with the Crô-Magnon Herrenvolk – another idea that has never gone away.) Gorganovič-Kramberger believed that his Neanderthalers at Krapina, as evidenced by his deep stratigraphic sequence of hearths, had succeeded one another over a long period of time during the warm period before the last ice age and that they were a people directly ancestral to modern man of today, a view already espoused by the German Gustav Schwalbe, whose patient study of all the Neanderthal remains available at the end of the nineteenth century finally put paid to any lingering faith in Virchow’s views. An American anthropologist recalled King’s coinage of Homo neanderthalensis and brought together all the Neanderthal material found by the end of the century under that classificatory name.

  Neanderthal bones from Spy.

  Broken bones from Krapina.

  By that time the first discovery had been made, in Java, of a type of man older and more primitive than the Neanderthalers. A Dutchman named Dubois had set out there to search for a human ancestor whose speculative existence had been inspired by reflections upon the gibbon, the odd man out among the apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, gibbon) in having a more globular skull than the rest, with a less protruded face, and walking more naturally on two legs like a human being. At the time a gibbon-like ancestry for the human line was not a silly thing to look into. Dubois encountered his first finds in 1891, with a molar tooth and then a skullcap strikingly lower and more massively browed than the original of the Neanderthalers. The next year he found a femur in what seemed to him to be a similar state of fossilization from seemingly the same geological context. He recognized that it carried a pathological bone growth as the result of injury. Interestingly, most anthropological opinion has now come round to the view that the femur does not belong with the skullcap and is of much more recent origin – many subsequent finds of the same sort of human species as Java Man, some of them very complete, have built up a comprehensive picture of this stage of human evolution. On the basis of the femur, Dubois invented a species name for his Java find, calling it erectus to mark its fully human carriage on long straight legs; if he was wrong about the association of the femur with the skull, he was right about the erect status of this new sort of human being, and the species name remains, in line with both its priority and its aptness. At the same time Dubois adopted a new genus for the moment, calling his Java creature Anthropopithecus erectus in a reversal of the components of Haeckel’s Pithecanthropus – ape-man, man-ape. Neither genus name is still with us – Java Man and his kind are now seen to belong to the genus Homo like the rest of us, though they carry the distinguishing species name erectus to mark them off from earlier, different and later species. When Dubois established the cranial capacity of his Java find at about 1000 ml of brains, more than double that of any ape, he saw in his discovery less of a man-like ape and more of an ape-like man, and changed to Haeckel’s Pithecanthropus, keeping erectus and dropping Haeckel’s alalus, with its imponderable implications about speech abilities or lack of them. He was content to find gibbon traits in the Java skull, as he had hoped to do, but he saw that Java Man was even further from the apes than he was from modern humanity. (Dubois, incidentally, had scorned all the Neanderthal discoveries as both recent and pathological until news of the Spy remains.) Dubois had a very inadequate grasp of the geological context of the Java finds and no real idea at all of their age, except that they were in a general way very old and more primitive than any human fossils found elsewhere at the time. Most authorities agreed with that: de Mortillet saw Java’s foreshadowing affinities with Neanderthal, and many in England with Schwalbe in Germany adopted a simple scheme of human descent from some ape-like ancestor through first Java Man then Neanderthal Man to Homo sapiens. Predictably someone said Java Man was just a microcephalic idiot, and some German workers saw in the skullcap the evidence for just a very old species of giant gibbon, but Haeckel – who had previously been happy to dish out genus and species names to a thought experiment – at last turned his interest to real fossils and gave his support to this Pithecanthropus made bone if not flesh. He sent Dubois a telegram ‘from the inventor of Pithecanthropus to his happy discoverer’.

  The skullcap from Java, very constricted when seen from above behind the heavy brows.

  The Mauer jaw.

  A fossil that more or less matched the jawless Java Man’s skullcap came to light in Germany in 1907, in gravel pits at Grafenrein, Mauer, near Heidelberg, at a depth of about 25 m. It was a very massive thing, that could easily be read as ape-like except that its full set of teeth were not ape-like at all but eminently human. Like the Neanderthal jaws, it had no chin. Its discovery at a very great depth in the earth suggested a high old age for the specimen which in turn suggested, along with its larger size, that it belonged to a skull more like that of Pithecanthropus than Neanderthal Man’s. This interpretation put Pithecanthropus in place in Europe as well as the Far East, as a likely ancestor to Neanderthal Man in the way that some anthropologists already expected. In the same year the skull from Gibraltar was again studied, after what can only be rated an incomprehensible obscurity since the early 1860s when one recalls that it had possessed all along a better preserved face and skull base than any other Neanderthaler found during the nineteenth century.

  In the last years of the century the authenticity of the ice age cave art was gradually established with the discovery of engravings under a stalagmitic layer at la Mouthe in the Dordogne in 1895 and the further finding in the same region of convincing engravings at Font de Gaume. As the artistic achievement of the Crô-Magnon sort of people, to all intents as modern in physical type as ourselves, became apparent, archaeological excavation was at the same time frequently revealing a sterile hiatus between the deposits containing Mousterian material (associated with Neanderthalers) and the deposits above with Upper Palaeolithic material (associated with the Crô-Magnon peoples). This sterile gap encouraged the thought that the Neanderthalers had not, after all, gone on to turn into the modern types in the simple line of human evolution from Pithecanthropus to Neanderthal to Crô-Magnon as many had come to believe. People who were uneasy with such a ready realization of the fact of human evolution, people who would rather not face up to the fact too soon and too clearly (with its inevitable reminder that we
are, in the end, descended from something like apes and monkeys), such people were relieved to think that the Neanderthalers had perhaps already faded away even before the arrival of the Crô-Magnons, from points comfortingly unknown, with no call for a fight let alone the possibility of any intermingling that might taint the modern human line with a more animal heritage. Even so, there were sites like Grimaldi on the Riviera where the red-ochred burials of the Upper Palaeolithic people seemed scarcely separated in time from the underlying Mousterians. In the end, of course, the whole situation has turned out as is usual with human affairs to be much more complicated than anyone originally thought; it is likely to be more complicated than we think nowadays, too.

  Neanderthal Man in the Twentieth Century

  Some of the most significant finds of the Neanderthal people were made in the years between the turn of the century and the First World War, particularly in France. In 1908 the well-preserved skeleton of a young male Neanderthaler was unearthed at le Moustier near les Eyzies in the Dordogne, the site which had already given its name to the stone tool kit so often found in association with Neanderthal physical remains. The le Moustier skeleton was examined by the German anatomist Klaatsch, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of the Neanderthalers’ extermination at the hands of the Crô-Magnon people; he was not willing to credit Neanderthal Man with much in the way of culture, believing that he had lived as ‘an animal among animals’. Klaatsch developed the view, distasteful and ominous as well as wrong, that the Neanderthalers lay on a line that led from the gorilla to the negro, while the Crô-Magnons graced a lineage from the orang to the modern European. None the less it was Klaatsch who spotted the Neanderthal kinship of the le Moustier adolescent. The young man of le Moustier had a very chequered career after his discovery, incidentally, which involved being sold to a museum in Berlin, facing the threat of air raids there during the Second World War (some said, actually being blown up by a bomb) and then being stolen by the Russians at the end of the war, turning up in Leningrad in the 1950s, minus his postcranial skeleton. The casts that archaeologists and anthropologists make and circulate among themselves have more than once stood them in good stead when the originals have, for one reason or another, become unavailable. But you cannot, for example, get genetic material from a cast.

  The body of the le Moustier adolescent had evidently been laid in the earth on its right side in a sleeping posture, the right arm supporting the head with cheek on elbow; it lay on a bed of flints and a fine Mousterian hand-axe was found just before the skeleton appeared, to go with what might have been other grave-goods in the form of reindeer and ox bones. It is always difficult to determine, especially with older excavations, whether finds like these were purposefully associated with Neanderthal burials by the mourning party, as it were, or whether they are just elements of the clutter of Neanderthal sites that ended up close to the interments. Opinions veer to this day as to the validity of such evidence of ‘provisions for the afterlife’ and so forth. We shall see that, time and again, the evidence recovered by excavation and laboratory examination can be variously interpreted and that hypotheses, however attractive, sometimes lack the force of inevitability that their protagonists confidently attribute to them. Marcellin Boule’s work on the la Chapelle skeleton, as set out in his monograph of 1911–13, is a case in point.

  The much-travelled skull from le Moustier.

  Excavator’s section at la Chapelle aux Saints, with the Neanderthal grave.

  Skull of the ‘old man’ of la Chapelle.

  When it was found in 1908 the skeleton of the old man of la Chapelle aux Saints – he was forty or so – was the most nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton to date and was to be the basis of a most influential, and partly misleading, reconstruction by Boule of Neanderthal Man’s physique and deportment. Parts missing at la Chapelle were supplied by bones from another fairly complete Neanderthal skeleton discovered at la Ferrassie in 1909. (Astonishingly, the la Ferrassie skeleton has recently turned out to carry unmistakable evidence that this Neanderthal adult male was a victim of lung cancer.) In 1910 an adult female was found at the same site, and subsequently the remains of five children, all buried together with the male in a sort of family vault: what Neanderthal burials can tell us about these people we shall discuss in a later chapter. Boule was sure that his reconstruction of Neanderthal Man, based on the la Chapelle skeleton, distanced the Neanderthalers far from modern humanity, to whom they could not be ancestral. The discovery of a fully modern human type at Combe Capelle, also in 1909, in apparent association with Upper Palaeolithic flint tools but only just above Mousterian levels, seemed to confirm his belief that the Crô-Magnon people must have arrived on the scene fully formed, with no time to have evolved out of their Neanderthal predecessors, whom they quickly supplanted. (The Combe Capelle skull also made the journey to Berlin and probably Leningrad too, but has never turned up again.)

  While Boule was working on la Chapelle, in 1910 evidence came to light at the French site of la Quina, which he clearly soon heard about, that overturned one of his several misrepresentations of Neanderthal Man’s physique and posture, but he ignored it. Ankle-bones were found at la Quina which proved that the Neanderthalers most certainly did not have divergent big toes, as the apes do, but Boule went on to incorporate the claim that they did into his report on the Neanderthal man from la Chapelle aux Saints. The, admittedly somewhat impressionistic, statue of Homo neanderthalensis, firmly based on Boule’s work, that stands on the terrace of the museum in les Eyzies sports an unambiguously diverged big toe (see colour plates).

  Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

  Homo sapiens sapiens.

  Boule was one of those nineteenth-century people (often, but by no means exclusively, French – and the type has persisted into this century, too) who never really embraced Darwinism, with its matter-of-fact mechanism of continuous evolution. Such people, with what degree of conscious choice we cannot always say, at heart preferred the catastrophism of Cuvier, with its succession of unrelated Creations and no continuous evolution of forms. Where Man was concerned, it was comfortable for them to be able to dismiss any and every candidate (like Neanderthal Man) that came along promising to embody the transition from a lower form to the higher form of modern mankind. They liked to think that some essential streak of modern humanity, if not full-blown moderns themselves, could always be tracked back into the remote past, bypassing all the unwelcome claimants for transitional evolutionary status. In this way the ‘presapiens’ idea was born (though the term was not coined till the 1930s): the idea that, in particular as regards brain size and skull shape, there would always have been some sort of modern men around to put the Neanderthalers and for that matter, if you wanted to push the issue, the Pithecanthropi in the shade. As long as you could posit the existence of such presapiens types far enough back into the very obscure past, preferably flourishing in as yet unexplored regions, you might never need to face up to human evolution at all. It was this sort of thinking, together with maybe ambition or revenge or a perverse sense of humour, that spawned the Piltdown hoax (in 1912), where an ape’s jaw, in a nod to evolutionary thinking, was mated with a fully human, big-brained, in fact modern cranium – to pick out just that streak of essential humanity, in the form of man’s higher mental powers, that was supposed to run like a silver thread through all the murky business of human evolution. (Interestingly, Boule thought, on the basis of brain anatomy as understood at the time, that the la Chapelle skull indicated that Neanderthal Man lacked the mental capacity for speech.)

  The man from la Chapelle as envisaged by the Illustrated London News in 1909.

  One fears overdoing the matter of Boule’s prejudices, for he was a distinguished scientist working within the limitations of his time, as all must, and he chanced with the old man of la Chapelle to be working with a diseased specimen whose pathology he did not fully recognize. It is an irony that Virchow, another and more open anti-evolutionist, saw pathology wh
ere there was none in order to dispose of inconvenient data, and Boule failed to see it where it was present (or at least failed to appreciate all its effects on the object of his study), to the same end.

  Neanderthal vertebrae.

  In order to sidetrack Neanderthal Man and get him as far away as possible from the noble line of human descent, Boule had to make him as ape-like as he could. The divergent toe was one such stratagem. The long spines he found on the neck vertebrae he interpreted as a simian trait which would prevent their owner from carrying his head held high like a proper human being – Boule did not in his day appreciate how variable the modern human population can be in respects like this but in fact such long spines can occur in perfectly upright people today. In Neanderthal Man’s backbone as a whole, Boule saw no properly S-shaped curve and concluded that his subject, and all his kind, must have gone around permanently bent forward. The ends of the shin-bones seemed proof to him that Neanderthalers could not straighten their knees, condemned to a shuffling gait which, taken with their lowered heads and sloping backs, must have looked as ape-like as you could wish. Again, modern populations contain individuals with the same sort of knee joints as the Neanderthal people, who do not shuffle on account of them. And while Boule was not unaware of the arthritic state and advanced years of the man of la Chapelle, he played down the effects of age and disease, in part with the honourable intention of producing a general description of the Neanderthal type and not just a characterization of one particular, damaged individual. But some of the specific effects of arthritis and age on the la Chapelle skeleton were thereby added to the misapprehended evidences of stooping and shuffling to reinforce the picture of an ape-like creature who could not possibly be ancestral to modern man. When Boule recalled the stratigraphy of the Grimaldi site where, as seemed to be the case at Combe Capelle, Mousterian remains were overlain almost without hiatus by the quite different Upper Palaeolithic material with Crô-Magnon bones, he felt content to conclude that the Neanderthalers had indeed been abruptly replaced by incomers for whom they were simply no match.