Neanderthal Read online

  In 1947 (but not published until 1957) a skull was found in France that afforded a final outing for the idea of a presapiens entity in Europe. The Fontéchevade skull (actually there were fragments of two skulls, but one of them may not be as old as the other and is of a juvenile individual) does not conclusively exhibit heavy brow-ridges, for the simple reason that it is broken at the point where it would do if it originally possessed them. (The Swanscombe skull of 1935–6 and 1955 is in the same boat, only more so.) This situation permitted a reconstruction of Fontéchevade II to be made without any suggestion of brow-ridges (backed up by the childishly browless fragments of Fontéchevade I) and so for Fontéchevade (and Swanscombe) to be advanced as just the sort of presapiens intruder into the primitive world of the Neanderthalers and their ancestors that the disciples of Boule wished to see. But the geology of Fontéchevade was shaky, with no firm evidence as to its age, and while the Swanscombe skull was certainly of great antiquity it was entirely possible that it had originally sported marked brow-ridges and so was a poor candidate for presapiens status anyway. Since the 1960s enthusiasm for the presapiens idea as a European phenomenon has faded, and people of what we might call a presapiens disposition now look above all to Africa for the first appearance of early Homo sapiens sapiens traits at a time when the rest of the world was struggling through the Neanderthalers or other local varieties of similarly backward types.

  We may conveniently end our review of historical developments in the field of human evolution, as particularly relevant to the Neanderthal issue, in 1960: not because no more Neanderthalers, to say nothing of earlier and very important fossils, have been found – indeed crucial Neanderthal discoveries have since been made in the Levantine region and in France, too, along with many more routine finds – but because by 1960 the main themes of Neanderthal controversy were clearly established and the detailed work of reinterpretation is part of the current state of the subject and needs to be discussed as such.

  The year 1960 saw the end of the excavation at Shanidar, in Iraqi Kurdistan, that had begun in 1953, in the hands of Rose and Ralph Solecki for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Mousterian tools were found to a depth of 5.5 m in a huge cave overlooking a river. In 1953 the flexed skeleton of a very small child was found there and then in 1957 those of three adults, with clear Neanderthal features. In 1960 five more Neanderthalers were dug out of the cave deposits. Of the nine persons now discovered, five seemed to have been deliberately buried and four accidentally killed under rock falls. There are probably more to be found at Shanidar, but in the present political situation the cave cannot be explored further. One of the bodies was found to be accompanied by a very high intensity of flower pollens, which suggested at the time the touching possibility of a mourning gesture at the graveside but has since been prosaically interpreted as the result of the blowing wind or burrowing rodents. One of the victims of rock fall had had a particularly harrowing life, even for his times: a blow to the left side of his head had fractured his skull and damaged the eye socket, almost certainly causing blindness in the left eye; at some time in life his right arm had been so badly injured that it withered away and it was eventually either removed by surgery or even came off; probably in the course of the same injury, his right foot and leg were wounded with permanent damage. He was evidently a severely crippled case who nevertheless lived on with healed wounds to die somewhere between the advanced age of thirty and the great age of forty-five. It is impossible, as with the cripple of la Chapelle, to imagine an old and rather useless individual like this being able to survive without some care and attention from his fellows, with all the implications for emotional attachments and social structure that thought brings. Taken together with the vignette of grieving Neanderthalers casting wreaths on the grave of one of their own, this revelation of Neanderthal humanity for a while brought the Neanderthalers closer to ourselves and further from Boule’s apish caricature. Boule’s work had by now been reassessed and his distortions removed from the image of Neanderthal Man, at least as far as anthropologists were concerned. There was a tendency to think that, washed and brushed up and in a collar and tie, Neanderthal Man might not arouse undue curiosity in the London Underground or the New York Subway. But the best joke ever made about Neanderthal Man has it that, if a Crô-Magnon Man came and sat next to you on a train, you would change seats – if a Neanderthal Man sat next to you, you would change trains! For the huge brow arches and heavy, pulled forward, chinless face would startle anywhere. Even if elements of a modern sort of behaviour, taking in grief and compassion, could be attributed to the Neanderthalers, it still remained for even the least classically featured of them to reduce their great and surely, to us, ugly faces in order to look like ancestors of ours. Whether they were our ancestors or not has been one of the burning questions of anthropology, which genetic studies now look set to help answer. If they were not, then the question of the humanity of their behaviour remains crucial to discussion of the origins and significance of our own.

  Neanderthal Man washed and brushed up for the New York subway in the 1930s, according to Professor Carleton S. Coon.

  Neanderthal Types

  We know the Neanderthal people from the remains of a few hundred individuals, not more than perhaps four hundred, from about eighty sites, even when stray finds of just the odd bone are taken into account as well as more complete skeletons. This may sound like a small number, but it is considerably higher than the numbers of earlier forms like Homo erectus, of whom we have about 150 specimens. Of the Neanderthal individuals known, about half are children.

  The Neanderthal children are interesting because they demonstrate that many of the noticeable physical distinctions of their people, like the heavy brow arches and the general robusticity of their bodies, put in an early appearance in the life of each and every Neanderthaler. Teeth studies, moreover, indicate that they matured rapidly during infancy; their brains, in particular, seem to have achieved nearly full size at an early age. The molar teeth of the Neanderthal children are already well developed and it has been possible, by counting layers in the surface enamel of the front teeth, to arrive at close estimates of age at death for many of the infant skeletons and skulls, with results that have been surprising in relation to determinations of brain size for the same specimens. The four-year-old Neanderthal child from Gibraltar, for example, already carried a brain of 1400 ml (as large as many fully grown adults today) in its young head. The Teshik Tash nine-year-old had reached 1500 ml.

  It might be said that the historical accident whereby it was the bones of Neanderthalers that first came to the attention of the scientific world in the nineteenth century got the search for human origins off to a skewed start. Neanderthal skeletons, in general, are not quite like those of any modern human beings, nor in some respects those of our remoter ancestors: their skulls, in particular, are very distinctive, but so in many ways are the rest of their bones. People who wanted to find human ancestors just like ourselves in the distant past were able to put the Neanderthalers aside as, if not freaks, then surely not on the direct line of human descent. People who expected to find a veritable ‘missing link’ sort of ape-man in our own evolutionary lineage were inclined to see Neanderthal Man as more simian than he really was and assumed that his traits would be found, more or less pronounced, in all other finds of fossil men. And so there were some researchers looking for human fossils as unlike Neanderthalers as possible, and others seeing Neanderthalers everywhere as new finds went on being made in Asia and Africa. The situation was complicated further in that, however racially distinctive and localized the Neanderthalers might be, they certainly represented a general stage of human evolution that might be tracked elsewhere in the world even where the particular distinguishing traits of the Neanderthalers were absent; and the Neanderthalers themselves turned out to show a considerable range of variability within their own type, with time and geography.

  A Neanderthal child’s jaw from Gibraltar, with the Gi
braltar woman’s skull in the background.

  The classic type was realized in the la Ferrassie couple as well as anywhere, and the description that follows of their traits (supplemented by details from other finds where necessary) paints the definitive portrait of the echt Neanderthaler. Facially, you could never mistake a Neanderthal person, male or female, for any modern human being from anywhere in the world, and if no single postcranial feature of the Neanderthal anatomy is wholly outside the modern human range, it is none the less true that the entire package of Neanderthal traits below the neck similarly adds up to a type not seen anywhere today. There is a general impression of robustness and heaviness of build, of squat compactness of body with short, powerful and slightly bowed limbs. The leg bones, for example, are noticeably curved, probably on account of strong attached musculature, and thickly rounded in section, with large slanting joints at the knee that must have made for a knobbly appearance if not for some slightly less than straight-leggedness. The massive shafts of Neanderthal thigh bones lack the oval section, front-to-back, seen in the same bones among modern hunting peoples, which results from a lifetime of purposeful forward motion; some researchers have seen in the Neanderthal pattern a clue to an indeed less purposeful way of life, with more random scrambling about than motivated walking and running. Neanderthal feet have no ape-like divergent big toes, but their toes in general are fat-boned, adapted again to barefoot scrabbling over rough ground rather than much in the way of a sustained walking gait. But the toes are not elongated like apes’ phalanges and the feet are well arched like our own. A Neanderthal footprint from a cave in Italy reveals, as would be expected, a broad foot. Neanderthal legs were short in proportion to trunk size, and shins were short in proportion to thighs, but not in a way that puts them outside the modern human range. Indeed, these physical proportions recall those of people today, like the Eskimos in particular, who live in cold circumstances where conservation of body heat would be compromised by long, lanky limbs. Some Neanderthal shin-bones are reported to carry the ‘squatting facets’ seen on the same bones today among people who habitually crouch down, in the absence of chairs by the fireside or shooting-sticks in the field.

  The male Neanderthaler of la Ferrassie.

  Limb bones from le Moustier.

  A Neanderthal footprint from Italy.

  Neanderthal hand-bones from la Ferrassie.

  Neanderthal half pelvis from Kebara.

  Neanderthal chests were thick-ribbed and barrelled in shape, with strong backs and spines, where the cervical vertebrae often carried longer spines than are usually seen today, presumably in connection with powerful musculature. The broad scapulae of the shoulders, again with marked bony muscle-attachment ridges, saw to it that the arms would not twist under heavy loading. The big hands were clearly capable of a powerful grip, with large and rounded finger tips and thumbs made up of two bones of equal length (where ours have a shorter distal phalange), but anatomical study has shown them to be as adept and manipulable as our own. Taken all round, Neanderthalers have rightly been described as ‘bear-like’ individuals!

  The Neanderthal pelvis was a little different from that of modern people. The sexes were more alike in pelvis shape than men and women are today and, until a complete pelvis with a birth canal of similar size to modern examples was found at a site in Israel, it was conjectured that the wider pelvis of the Neanderthalers might point to greater head size (and brain development) of Neanderthal babies at birth. This was thought to reflect a situation wherein Neanderthal children were more fully formed in terms of brain development at birth than children are today, with consequently less scope for flexible and fruitful brain improvements through long years of childhood. Neanderthal children may well have matured faster than ours do, achieving the large brains of their adulthood much more quickly, but not because they were born with bigger heads through Neanderthal birth canals that were any larger than those of women today. The differences of the Neanderthal pelvis are probably witness to differences of gait and locomotion, with the centre of gravity of Neanderthal bodies forward of our own and falling more over the hips, with inferior shock absorption at the hip joints.

  Neanderthal males stood at about 1.65 m on average, as against the modern European average height of about 1.75 m. Females were only a little shorter, with the shortest known (la Ferrassie) at 1.55 m. The tallest male was found in Israel at a site called Amud, and he stood at nearly 1.8 m. He also sported the largest brain of any fossil man, at 1740 ml.

  The different shapes of modern (left) and Neanderthal (right) brains.

  Neanderthalers in general had bigger brains than we do. When we review the steady increase of brain size throughout human evolution, we might well be impressed by the size of Neanderthal brains. The Neanderthal people certainly belonged to a stage of human evolution that had fully achieved big brain status – but the brain was housed in a different skull architecture and belonged to a body that was, all in all, ruggedly and heavily built. In part, the Neanderthalers’ exalted brain size relates more to their body weight and concomitant metabolic processes than it necessarily does to mental ability. And the Neanderthal brain was differently shaped, and differently developed in some respects, from modern brains, partly because it was carried in a skull very different from our own. People today are less confident than in the nineteenth century that brain shape and relative degrees of development in different parts of the brain can tell us so very much about the mental capacities of the individuals to whom the brains belong. Boule thought that areas of the brain then firmly identified as concerned with speech capacity were less well developed in the Neanderthal type than they are in our own brains, but most workers today eschew rigid phrenology of that kind. Perhaps the one significant thing we can record about the Neanderthal brain in the present state of research is that the Neanderthal neocortical ratio was lower than it is on average with modern populations; in other words, the extent of the outer neocortex of the brain, which we think plays an important part in the complex bioelectrical switching of brain messages, was smaller in relation to the total brain size than is the case with ourselves, and the evolutionarily ‘older’ parts of the brain were correspondingly larger in proportion. It is interesting to note that Eskimos possess large brains, to go with their stocky cold-adapted bodies, but their brains are rounder than most and certainly rounder than the long, low, top-flattened brains of the Neanderthalers.

  Neanderthal brain size ranged from about 1200 ml to 1740 ml, where modern brain capacity usually falls between 1200 ml and 1500 ml, though there have been perfectly normal people – for what that is worth – with brains of 1000 ml and 2000 ml at the extremes. The average Neanderthal woman had a brain of 1300 ml and the average man of 1600 ml, both in excess of the average woman and man today. Their brains do, incidentally, indicate that, like us, most Neanderthalers were right-handed, with larger areas to the right at the front and to the left at the rear; evidence from their teeth reinforces this conclusion.

  The skulls in which the Neanderthal brains were housed are the most strikingly different thing about these people. Unlike any people living today, including those that live in very cold places as the classic Neanderthalers did, they had long and low skulls with a sort of bun-shape at the back, which look like slightly flattened globes when viewed from the rear, in clear contrast with modern skulls which appear higher and more rounded seen from the sides and look like steep-sided loaves from the back. These differences from our own crania might have been disguised by good heads of hair (of what colour we do not know, any more than we can know their skin colour) but the Neanderthal face presented a quite unmistakable picture of divergence from the modern human type, even when we acknowledge the range of our type today that can include quite heavily browed individuals and populations. Neanderthal brow arches were much bigger than anything seen in the modern world and of different form from the brow-ridges of earlier forms of fossil men like Homo erectus. In Neanderthal Man the bone of the brows did not form
a single bar over the eyes but was separated into two rounded arches, seemingly of great solidity and heaviness but in fact lightened by the presence of sinuses within them. Most of our fossil ancestors possessed prominent brow-ridges, but the arrangement of the Neanderthalers was distinctive: at least it would have served to keep their hair out of their eyes! Such brow-ridges and arches are seen to have played their part in a general skull architecture adapted to strong jaw musculature to facilitate the workings of massive jaws with large teeth. The Neanderthal jaw usually had little or no chin, having perhaps no need of one in its generally rugged state, and the part of it reaching up to articulate with the cranium was broader than it is with us. The angle made by this piece with the arcade holding the teeth was more acute, closer to a right angle, so that instead of an effect of a delicate jaw tucked in under the skull, the Neanderthalers presented a picture of a huge jaw thrust out. The front teeth were very large by our standards and the top incisors were often rather shovel-shaped, a Neanderthal trait seen at lower frequency in later European populations. The front teeth are usually worn from heavy use and sometimes carry marks suggesting that they were used like a vice to clamp meat, sinews or hides while these materials were being cut with stone tools: scratches on the teeth show that the tools were worked very close up to the teeth, by right-handed persons. Front and back teeth show exposed dentine and pulp cavities, indicative of heavy wear, and the Neanderthalers exhibit a high incidence of a genetically determined dental pattern called taurodontism whereby root fusion creates enlarged pulp cavities, a useful stratagem of nature that permits prolonged use of badly worn teeth; some Eskimos show this trait today and it is found elsewhere in association with the presence of extra X chromosomes. These traits in common between the Neanderthal people and inhabitants of the cold north today imply no genealogical link between them – rather both peoples have adapted, along sometimes similar lines, to similar environmental conditions. The Eskimos, too, use their front teeth as vices and shears and pull skins through them in the course of preparing hides for clothes. In the la Ferrassie male’s lower jaw, it is the left molars that are most worn while in the upper jaw the right side teeth have suffered correspondingly and teeth marks indicate a lifetime of heavy horizontal working. Neanderthal back teeth often display additional cusps, and there is almost invariably a gap between the last molar at the back and the ascending ramus (the upright portion of the jaw that hinges with the cranium) which relates to the length of the jaw thrust forward under the projecting Neanderthal face.