Neanderthals are the closest known relative
of
Homo sapiens
,
and today we know that we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, until the end of their long reign about 40,000 years ago.
Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn't get along back then, but we haven't been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were unearthed in the 19th century, often calling them clumsy and clumsy. idiots or worse.
Even today, their name is sometimes used to refer to misbehaving members of our species, although there is no evidence that they practiced any prehistoric hooliganism.
Well, perhaps with one exception: what they did in the Bruniquel cave in southwestern France would be frowned upon today.
Hundreds of intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged in two large ellipsoidal structures and several smaller piles, during a time when—as researchers confirmed in 2016—only Neanderthals roamed Europe.
No one knows what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward creativity and perhaps even symbolism.
Structures created by Neanderthals in the Bruniquel cave.De Luc-Henri Fage/SSAC
No other structure of this type has been discovered so far.
But there have been many other signs that Neanderthal minds were engaged in things that many researchers did not expect, says archaeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria, Canada.
Author of a book published in 2021,
Growing Up in the Ice Age
, Nowell lays out the most interesting new discoveries in an article published in 2023,
Rethinking Neanderthals
, in the
Annual Review of Anthropology
.
“In the last 10 years, things have changed radically,” he says.
“I never thought we would have the wide range of information about their lives that we have now.”
In addition to many new fossil discoveries, new methods of analyzing ancient biological molecules have allowed researchers to examine ancient DNA and proteins they didn't even know still persisted.
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Most surprisingly, researchers have deciphered the complete genome of several Neanderthal individuals, offering new insights into their biology and ours: there is no longer any doubt that humans and Neanderthals interbred.
“Neanderthals are partly our ancestors, although we did not evolve from them,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
Furthermore, the numerous newly unearthed or analyzed artifacts, some of which are now safely attributed to Neanderthals thanks to improved methods of dating archaeological finds, make up quite a collection.
“If you had asked me 20 years ago, I would have said that there was a big difference in behavior, and that Neanderthals lacked many of the complex behaviors that we found in
Homo sapiens
,” says Stringer.
“Now that gap has narrowed considerably.”
This is what we have learned from what our close relatives left behind when they roamed the Earth between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, across most of Eurasia.
Art and craft
Some of the Neanderthal artifacts discovered were very practical in nature.
Pieces of twisted wood fiber attached to a modified stone flake found in France in 2017 suggest that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make rope, for example, which could have opened the door to the manufacture of other objects such as clothing, bags, nets and mats.
There is also evidence that Neanderthals heated birch bark to make adhesives—no small feat.
“A few researchers have recently tried to do the same thing under similar circumstances,” Nowell says, “and it's a lot harder than most people thought.”
Beyond everyday tasks, Neanderthals liked to decorate themselves.
We now know that they were already using colored pigments such as red ocher between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago, perhaps not only on objects, but also on their own bodies, and it is possible that they sometimes imported the substance from tens of kilometers away.
Excavations have also revealed pierced and sometimes painted shells that were probably strung and worn.
A creative Neanderthal from Croatia made a necklace or other ornament from white-tailed eagle talons, and elsewhere, tool marks found on bird bones suggest that feathers were also popular.
A creative Neanderthal from present-day Croatia made an ornament out of white-tailed eagle talons.
The pieces are arranged here to give an idea of what it may have looked like originally.
LUKA MJEDA / ZAGREB
And the famous rock art found in many sites in Europe and elsewhere?
Until recently, none of them were thought to be Neanderthals.
But in 2018, a study published in
Science
showed that the lines and dots painted on the walls of several caves in Spain must have been the work of Neanderthals, since they were dated to a period in which there were not yet
Homo sapiens
.
There is also evidence of engravings: “hashtags” carved into the wall of a cave in Gibraltar, as well as on a small stone, a flint flake and the big toe bone of a deer.
There is still no evidence that Neanderthals created recognizable representations of, for example, animals or people, says Nowell.
That may have been a
Homo sapiens
innovation .
“There are a lot of these little isolated examples of interesting things that Neanderthals did, these kinds of symbolic behavioral impulses.
But they do not seem to last long or lead to something else, as it does in
Homo sapiens
populations ,” he explains.
Grow as humans
One explanation for the differences in artistic expression could be that Neanderthals simply thought differently.
Perhaps a member of our species enthusiastically asking a Neanderthal why he drew or carved what he did would have received nothing more than a shrug.
Of course, it's very difficult to reconstruct what differences there might be in brain structure or cognition, but Nowell is intrigued by a series of recent studies in which human brain cells were engineered to contain Neanderthal versions of some key brain genes. brain development.
When grown on plates in the lab, clusters of cells engineered to have one of these Neanderthal gene variants grew into tiny brain structures that were more popcorn-shaped than the brain cells of Homo
sapiens
. while those with
sapiens
genes were more spherical.
In another study on a different brain development gene,
sapiens
minibrains formed more neurons in the same period of time than minibrains containing the Neanderthal version.
These findings certainly suggest that genetic differences between our species affect the structure of our brains.
Still, it's hard to know what those differences mean, Stringer says, or even whether those genetic variants are really Neanderthal.
Studying a more genetically diverse sample of
Homo sapiens
today could reveal more variation in our own species and possibly greater overlap with Neanderthals, she says.
A model of a Neanderthal woman at the Neanderthal Museum in Germany reflects recent discoveries suggesting that Neanderthals used bird feathers to decorate themselves.NEANDERTHAL MUSEUM,
“I think there were cognitive differences between Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
,” says Nowell.
But, he adds, demographic differences may also have created more obstacles to the flourishing of Neanderthal culture.
Neanderthals were very rare: their world population did not exceed 100,000 individuals at any time.
Perhaps the ideas didn't spread because Neanderthals were too isolated, Nowell says, and then disappeared when local groups became extinct.
Homo
sapiens
reached much higher densities and would have had much larger social networks.
New evidence indicates that Homo sapiens
children
probably also had longer childhoods.
“We think that Neanderthal girls probably reached sexual maturity earlier,” says Nowell: studies of fossils of Neanderthal children, which are found relatively frequently, suggest that the newborns had larger brains than sapiens
newborns
and that they grew faster. quickly
“A longer childhood allows children more time to learn and experiment in relative safety,” Nowell says, giving
sapiens
children an advantage .
He also points out that learning doesn't just mean creating new neurons and connections: it also means pruning connections that aren't useful.
Therefore, if the brains of young
sapiens
produced more neurons than those of Neanderthals, as the experiments suggest, and if our childhood also lasted longer, “this could have favored broader learning,” he says, with more room for trial and error and making and breaking connections.
Endogamy and encounters between species
New studies have recently provided some intriguing snapshots of Neanderthal family life.
A DNA analysis of the remains of 11 individuals found in the Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia revealed that some were closely related and probably lived around the same time, says paleoanthropologist Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, who participated in the study. excavation.
"We have found a father and daughter pair, and some individuals who descended from the same mother or perhaps were mother, daughter and granddaughter."
Genetic similarities were very high among all the individuals studied, indicating that it was probably a very isolated population.
“Men were even more closely related than women,” adds Viola, “suggesting that it was probably more common for women to join a new group to find a mate.”
This was probably the ancestral pattern in humans as well;
It certainly still is in chimpanzees.
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Although Neanderthals may seem a bit strange to
Homo sapiens
, ancient DNA studies show that they did interbreed with our species.
For Viola, this has important implications.
“
Homo sapiens
clearly recognized Neanderthals as mating partners, suggesting that they considered them human, perhaps 'the weird guys who live behind the mountains', but human nonetheless,” she says.
“More or less whenever both species have coexisted extensively, there has been genetic exchange.”
A Neanderthal in present-day Gibraltar made this carving, which has inevitably been nicknamed the “hashtag.”
J RODRÍGUEZ-VIDAL ET AL / PNAS 2014
An irresistible kiss
DNA may not have been the only thing our
Homo sapiens
ancestors exchanged with Neanderthals.
Although our last common ancestor is believed to have lived at least 450,000 years ago, a 2017 study analyzing DNA from calcified dental plaque from Neanderthal teeth showed that populations of a common microbe that lived in the mouths of Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
They diverged genetically at least 300,000 years later.
This suggests that both species acquired the microbe from the same source at around the same time, or that they somehow passed it on to each other.
There are, of course, other possible explanations, such as sharing food, says paleogeneticist Laura Weyrich of Pennsylvania State University, who led the study.
“But the suggestion that it might have been a kiss proved irresistible to the media,” she says.
“And it is possible that it was.”
That study also revealed other interesting aspects of Neanderthal behavior.
DNA analysis suggested that a Spanish Neanderthal with a dental abscess had probably been eating moldy plant matter covered in penicillin-producing fungi, as well as poplar bark containing pain-relieving salicylic acid.
The study also casts doubt on the widespread idea that all Neanderthals were staunch carnivores.
While a Neanderthal from Spy Cave in Belgium had a fairly stereotypical diet of wild sheep and woolly rhinos, research revealed that this young adult also liked some mushrooms with his food.
“On the other hand, the Neanderthals from the El Sidrón cave in Spain did not seem to eat much meat,” explains Weyrich.
“Instead, it seems that they fed mainly on mushrooms and, surprisingly, on pine nuts.”
The lack of vegetables could be excusable: in a 2022 study, also based on the Neanderthal genome, an analysis of odor receptor genes found that Neanderthals would have been less sensitive to odors perceived as green, floral and spicy than us.
However, at the Shanidar site in modern-day Iraq, researchers found evidence that Neanderthals cooked legumes such as lentils, while another recent study found starch grains that suggest that Neanderthals in Italy—of course—made flour.
A Neanderthal munching on pine nuts may seem like the pinnacle of flexibility, endurance, and even good taste, but one gruesome detail must be mentioned: the El Sidrón bones also show signs of cannibalism.
This may have had an unknown cultural significance—rites involving cannibalism have existed in many cultures—but it does not appear that the local population was prosperous 50,000 years ago.
(This is in stark contrast to a Neanderthal group in Germany from 125,000 years ago who were apparently large enough to hunt, butcher, and eat elephants.)
This giant deer foot bone, decorated by Neanderthals, fortunately survived the medieval trade in so-called unicorn bones from the Central German cave in which it was found.V.
MINKUS
Decline and persistence
Was cannibalism a sign of a species in decline, perhaps even before
Homo sapiens
made their first forays into Europe?
It's hard to know, but we've long wondered why Neanderthals became extinct and we didn't.
“Perhaps if
Homo sapiens
had not
been there,” says Nowell, “would that niche have remained open to Neanderthals?”
There is no evidence of violence between Neanderthals and modern humans, Nowell adds;
Few researchers today seem to believe that
Homo sapiens
hunted Neanderthals.
A higher infant mortality rate may be part of the explanation, Nowell says.
“Even a small difference can cause population decline across generations.”
But what did Neanderthals have that put them at a disadvantage, if anything?
Could it have just been bad luck?
“I think that as
Homo sapiens
increased in numbers 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals were already in trouble,” Stringer says.
“The environment in this period fluctuated constantly from almost as warm as today to freezing cold, sometimes within a few decades.”
The vegetation changed, the animals moved.
“Perhaps
Homo sapiens
were better able to cope with these changes, because they worked more in networks, helping each other or exchanging cultural knowledge,” she says.
Even without a direct confrontation, it is conceivable that Neanderthals would have been forced to give way to
Homo sapiens
and ended up on the margins of what used to be their favorite places to be.
Still, Nowell says, Neanderthals may have played a role in our success.
Homo
sapiens
may have brought new technologies, but they may also have learned skills from Neanderthals, who had lived in Europe for millennia.
Over time, the remaining Neanderthals, who lived in shrinking groups with few, if any, attractive mates, many of them close relatives, might simply have decided to join a group of
Homo sapiens,
and might well have been Welcome there, says Viola.
And because of our interbreeding, something of the Neanderthals still survives in us.
“There is more Neanderthal DNA in the billions of humans alive today than there was when they still existed,” Viola says.
“In some ways, Neanderthals are still here.”
Tim Vernimmen
is a freelance science journalist born near Antwerp, Belgium.
This means that about 2% of his DNA probably comes from Neanderthals, although he has not yet verified this.
Article translated by Debbie Ponchner.
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