Neanderthal Read online

  People who espoused the idea of superior invaders into Western Europe, bearing the Upper Palaeolithic culture of sophisticated stone tools and works of art and displacing the Neanderthalers, were not of one mind as to where these invaders had come from. Some thought it might be Eastern Europe, some thought it was Asia and some already favoured Africa as the first home of modern man. In the year when Boule completed his account of the Neanderthal people as evidenced by la Chapelle and la Ferrassie, the German Hans Reck put forward for consideration a modern sort of human skull he had found at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa in presumed association with the fossils of a long-extinct fauna. This was the first of many claims for the very early appearance of modern humanity in Africa and, like some other such claims since, it turned out that Reck’s Oldoway Man was nowhere near as old as he thought, being a recent burial intrusive into the context of the very early animal bones. Today, too, there are key human fossils from East Africa about whose significance as very early examples of the modern human type there is considerable doubt along just the same lines as there was with Oldoway Man. At the same time there is a growing conviction among anthropologists, based on some soundly dated fossils, that modern man did indeed appear at a very early date in Africa and it would be ironic if the sort of thinking that Reck was expressing back in 1913 on the basis of the wrong fossil currently looked like turning out to be correct. It seems unlikely that Boule himself could ever have seen Africa as the likely home of anything so exalted as his presapiens humanity.

  The year 1914 saw the first discovery of what would come to be seen as a strain in the Neanderthal camp of people who were clearly not as Neanderthal, if you like, as the classic Neanderthalers of la Chapelle, etc. Krapina had already hinted at this situation. At Ehringsdorf in Thuringia, not far from Taubach where Neanderthal remains had been found over forty years before, a child’s skeleton was discovered in the year of the outbreak of the First World War. Even young children’s bones can already display unmistakable Neanderthal features, but in the case of the Ehringsdorf child and of the woman whose skeleton was found at the same site in 1925, the Neanderthal traits were less distinct. In time, many more of these less-than-classic Neanderthalers were found, especially outside Western Europe, prompting new theories about the evolution of both the classic Neanderthal type and of modern man. It is pleasant to report, incidentally, that it was Virchow’s son Hans who correctly identified the Ehringsdorf woman’s character as a form of Neanderthaler, albeit less distinctly Neanderthal than most discovered to date.

  Between 1917 and 1923, at a cave called Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, a series of discoveries was made which promised to rescue Neanderthal Man from the extreme depths of simian degradation to which Boule’s interpretation of his physical remains had condemned him. At this site Neanderthal Man was credited with nothing less than a cave-bear cult, collecting and artfully arranging the skulls and long bones of these huge and rather man-shaped animals on natural shelves of rock or in an artificially constructed box of stone slabs. He might have been, on the basis of Boule’s anatomical work, a brutish fellow, but evidently he was capable of some sort of magical or even religious sentiment that inspired these non-utilitarian provisions. This interpretation of the Drachenloch finds has not altogether stood the test of time, though there is other evidence suggestive of a bear cult, as we shall see.

  The discovery at Broken Hill.

  In 1921 something like a Neanderthaler was found in Africa for the first time, at a place then called Broken Hill in Rhodesia, and now called Kabwe in Zimbabwe. Mining for lead and zinc on a limestone hillside turned up a skull whose general resemblance to Neanderthal Man’s was immediately obvious, though the brow-ridge over the eyes outdid anything seen on any Neanderthal specimen. The teeth, on the other hand, were of a fully modern kind. There was also a femur and fragments of a tibia and pelvis, which are now considered likely not to belong with the skull, but which at the time could be interpreted to suggest that a basically primitive form of man might have survived in Africa to a late date, having acquired a modern sort of postcranial skeleton but retaining a backward skull. This was all of a piece with colonial attitudes towards African culture in general. In fact, dating a find like that of Broken Hill was no easy matter at the time: we nowadays regard ‘Rhodesia Man’ not as a late surviving primitive but as a very early step towards the modern, and older than the classic Neanderthalers of Europe.

  The picture of human evolution that could be envisaged in the mid-l920s was still a simple one: there were only the Neanderthalers and Java Man to go on. You could easily plump for a simple unilineal descent from some remote and undiscovered ape-like ancestor through Pithecanthropus (Java) then Neanderthal Man to ourselves, which at least had the merit of making the most of the evidence to hand; or you could posit an as yet untraced line of more sapiens-like humanity, again from an undiscovered ape-like ancestor, including Pithecanthropus in the scheme or not (probably not, he was too rough a customer) and definitely excluding Neanderthal Man as a doomed byway of human evolution. The gaps in the latter hypothesis were glaring, indeed it was all gap, but those in the former were clear enough too – no remote ape-like ancestor, no transitional forms to Pithecanthropus, and none from Neanderthal to modern. In the decade-and-a-half before the Second World War, those gaps started to be filled in, but in complicated ways that fuelled controversy.

  In 1925 the first of the South African ape-men put in an appearance, in the form of an ambiguously infantile skull of debatable geological age that could not be definitely characterized to everyone’s satisfaction. The ‘Taung Baby’, so named after its find site, was a curiously distorted and damaged fossil, with part of its brain exposed as a naturally mineralized cast. Emphasizing their human affinities, its discoverer interpreted its teeth as indicating an age of about five years at death – he considered the brain, too, to be suggestive of the first steps towards humanity taken by a basically ape-like animal. Dart called his baby ape-man Australopithecus africanus: the African species of Southern Ape. But most workers in the field of human evolution concluded that this was simply a new sort of fossil ape whose immaturity had fooled Dart into thinking it showed signs of humanity when it did not. As the geology of its find spot was not well documented, it might not be as old as Dart hoped either. In fact, Dart was amazingly right in his interpretation of the Taung Baby’s significance and only wrong about its date in not being able, at the time, to see that it was even older than he thought it might be. From 1936 onwards finds of adult Australopithecines were made in various South African caves, but it would not be until after the war that due recognition could come to Australopithecus and his kind with postwar finds that established, moreover, the bipedalism of the Australopithecines: walking on two legs like human beings and quite unlike the apes.

  The separated skull, jaw and brain cast pieces of the ‘Taung Baby’.

  Skull fragment from Zuttiyeh.

  Also in 1925 the upper facial portion of something like a Neanderthaler was found at Zuttiyeh in Galilee, harbinger of all the important finds to be made subsequently in the same area, while the skull of a juvenile Neanderthaler came to light on Gibraltar. The year 1929 saw the start of Neanderthal discoveries in Italy, and in 1931 another site in Java produced eleven jawless skulls that at first glance looked very much in the Neanderthal mould, though their dating was obscure. And then the puzzling picture of Neanderthal intermixture with modern types at Mount Carmel in Palestine began to take shape; associated with Mousterian tools, there were found bones from some dozen individuals that included a clearly Neanderthal woman and some robust but equally clearly non-Neanderthal skulls. Any simple scheme of human evolution was now faced with complications and the Levantine region remains to this day of critical importance in the discussion of modern human origins and the fate of the Neanderthalers, with startling new finds and datings at the forefront of anthropological research.

  In 1933 a skull was found at Steinheim in Germany. Apparently pretty old
, it was neither quite modern nor patently Neanderthal in form; it was heavily brow-ridged but seemingly rounder like a modern skull, and it was for this skull that the term ‘presapiens’ was coined, though the essential idea of a presapiens line of descent was already in currency, as we have seen.

  The Steinheim skull.

  The Swanscombe fragments.

  The excavations at la Ferrassie, which had already turned up an adult male and female, were concluded in 1934, having additionally revealed the burials of two children and three small infants in what looked like a regular graveyard under the rock shelter. There were various indications of grave-goods and ritual practices at la Ferrassie which have resisted subsequent debunking much better than has been the case with some other claimed pointers to Neanderthal spirituality and we shall consider them fully in a later chapter.

  Pieces of a skull were found in 1935–6 (and astonishingly added to in 1955 with the finding of another piece belonging to it) at Swanscombe in England. It resembled the Steinheim find, neither full sapiens nor Neanderthal, but evidently older than both the last ice age to which the classic Neanderthalers were seen to belong and the warmer interglacial period before the last ice age in which the more generalized Neanderthalers of, say, Krapina and Ehringsdorf apparently found their place. (It was in 1936, too, that the child’s cranium found just over a hundred years earlier at Engis in Belgium was finally recognized as belonging to a Neanderthal child.) The recognition that the classic Neanderthalers were a human species of the last ice age, its earlier phases at least, and that their antecedence might be traced back into the preceding interglacial period prompted the American anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička to theorize that the Neanderthal type with all its physical ruggedness represented an adaptation to extreme cold, rather like the physique of the Eskimos of today, only more so and starting from a pre-modern ancestor of the last interglacial. This idea, too, is still with us, having been taken on by several distinguished anthropologists since the Second World War. On the eve of the war, at a place called Monte Circeo in Italy, a further and very intriguing Neanderthal find was made, which the discoverer interpreted as the ritual placing of the skull of a Neanderthal individual, with the opening in its base for the spinal cord brutally enlarged, at the centre of a small circle of stones. It was a speculative picture of ceremonial brain-eating and cultic practice at some sort of shrine that, however barbarous, brought the Neanderthalers closer to ourselves in this apparent display of ‘religious’ concern. The Neanderthal people of Krapina may have looked like cannibals, or the victims of some other people’s flesh-eating propensities, but the Monte Circeo find, at least as interpreted by its discoverers, was suggestive of belief and ritual. This side of the Neanderthalers, real or imagined, was to be played up to a peak of enthusiasm for their spiritual potential in the 1960s and 1970s which has since, it has to be said, rather faded in the light of harder-hearted interpretations of the evidence of places like Monte Circeo, just as the bear cult notion born at Drachenloch has similarly been revised. And a like fate has overtaken the spiritual implications once seen in the circle of wild goat horns around the burial of a Neanderthal boy at Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan, discovered at about the same time as the Monte Circeo skull. (Teshik Tash retains, however, the distinction of being the most eastern, and most mountainously remote, outpost of the Neanderthalers.) Still, while he lasted, the spiritually enhanced version of Neanderthal Man came as a welcome contrast to the merely ape-like Australopithecines and the clearly brutish Pithecanthropines: compared with them, he was practically one of us.

  Pithecanthropus had meanwhile been given a boost before the Second World War by the spectacular discoveries made at Zhoukoudian (formerly rendered Choukoutien) near Beijing (formerly Peking) in China. The first fragments came to light in the late 1920s, in the form of teeth and pieces of skull, in association with faunal remains of extinct animals and some rather undistinguished stone tools. By 1937 there were the parts of fourteen skulls, eleven lower jaws, assorted teeth and a few limb bones. The study of them was conducted by Franz Weidenreich, who had previously worked on the Ehringsdorf material, and he made excellent casts of the original finds. At the end of 1941, with the Japanese on the doorstep, the Zhoukoudian material was packed up to be sent to America, under guard of a party of US Marines, for safekeeping. The Marines were captured by the Japanese and nothing has ever been seen since of the original finds of ‘Peking Man’, or Pithecanthropus erectus as he came to be known in light of his obvious kinship with the Java Man discovery of half a century before. (All such material, since found more widely, is now scientifically called Homo erectus as these people plainly belonged to the human genus.) There have been tales of boxes of bones in New York apartments and the like, but none has stood investigation. The original ‘Peking Man’ is now available to science only in the form of Weidenreich’s excellent casts, photographs and notes. And, of course, the further discoveries of Homo erectus have reduced our reliance on the Zhoukoudian material in arriving at an overall characterization of this phase of human evolution. Interestingly, Weidenreich thought he had followed the cannibal trail back well before Krapina at Zhoukoudian, noting that there were many more skull parts than limb bones on the site, with evidence of smashed faces and enlarged basal holes in the skulls, suggestive of brain extraction.

  Neanderthal child burial at Teshik Tash (skull fragments in black) with goats’ horns around (grey).

  After the Second World War the accumulated evidence of human evolution that had been raggedly piling up for almost a century was subjected to a more rigorous classification than had been thought necessary before. Evolutionary thinking in general had moved on and it was seen to be no longer good enough to hand out fresh scientific-sounding labels as little more than nicknames to every new fossil that came along, though the habit was not abandoned overnight. In time, only two genera were allowed to survive – Australopithecus and Homo, doing away with Pithecanthropus and many more that had been recklessly coined for new fossils as they appeared. Neanderthal Man, Crô-Magnon Man and the modern populations of the world were seen, in this spirit, to be all of the same species, Homo sapiens, with subspecies distinctions into Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It was Ernest Hooton of Harvard who formalized the division of Neanderthal-type finds into an earlier generalized form (as seen at Krapina, Ehringsdorf and Saccopastore in Italy) and the later classic expression of la Chapelle, la Ferrassie, etc. Weidenreich developed the idea of humanity as a single worldwide genus Homo, with strongly localized (i.e. racial) variations, that has gone through a sequence of species–phases (erectus, sapiens), not necessarily in strict synchronism and always preserving local lines of descent with distinctive variations at the same time as remaining interfertile across its global range. He thought that the common pressures of natural selection, and interbreeding across the borders of populations, have kept humanity advancing in a broadly similar way all over the world. This view was in marked contrast to that of the majority, perhaps, of anthropologists who have believed that new forms of humanity have arisen in particular places and spread out to outdo and replace the representatives of older forms. These two conflicting ideas of human evolution are still with us and nowhere does their clash reverberate so loudly as in the study of Neanderthal Man and his part (or lack of it) in our own origins and our potential part in his downfall. Weidenreich himself was undecided about the Neanderthal question – for him, the Neanderthalers might or might not have been the direct ancestors in Europe of the modern Europeans, but in any case in his view the general sort of stage of human evolution to which they belonged was one that humanity everywhere must have gone through, even if the European Neanderthalers as such were a race vanished without descendants.

  Reconstruction of the skull of ‘Peking Man’.

  In the 1950s the American anthropologist F. Clark Howell took up Hrdlička’s pre-war suggestion that classic Neanderthal Man’s distinctive features might well be seen as an extreme adaption to
the severe cold of the last ice age, or failing that as a pronounced genetic drift into certain exaggerated physical traits that was possible in a small-numbered and climatically isolated population in Western Europe. On this basis, he proposed that classic status could be attributed to those West European Neanderthalers of the first half of the last ice age like la Chapelle, la Ferrassie, le Moustier, Spy, Gibraltar, Monte Circeo, and the original Feldhofer find, while the more generalized form would include what he called the ‘progressive Neanderthals’ of Krapina, Saccopastore, Tabun (the Mount Carmel Neanderthal woman), Teshik Tash and so forth, who belonged to the warmer interglacial period before the last ice age got under way. To these progressives, he granted the potential to evolve further towards the classic type in Western Europe but also, in Western Asia and the Levant, the potential to become modern Homo sapiens sapiens, as seen in some of the Mount Carmel individuals. He envisaged the possibility that it was from this source that what we call the Crô-Magnons arose, taking their chance to get into Europe when a milder interstadial within the last ice age let them through. In essence, this idea, too, is still with us, though the Middle Eastern Homo sapiens sapiens component is nowadays more likely to be thought to owe its appearance to evolutionary events within Africa on the ultimate basis of something like ‘Rhodesia Man’, who admittedly shares general traits with the Neanderthalers but could not now be considered to be in detail any sort of Neanderthal as encountered in Europe (nor to be as recent in date).