Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived

by Chip Walter

  The same arthritic man that Marcellin Boule had maligned in 1908 as stooped and apish had also clearly been cared for by his fellow tribesmen. He was not young when he met his end, but forty to fifty years old, ancient by Neanderthal standards. Walking must have been agonizing given the state of his bones. He died with no more than two teeth, which would have made eating the normal, rough Neanderthal diet nearly impossible. Yet this man’s fellow tribesmen must have carried and fed him specialized foods for years, otherwise he would never have lived to such a ripe age.

  This gives us a peek into what the Neanderthal mind may have been like, but only a peek. Behaviors like these tell us that Neanderthals probably felt the loss of death, mourned those close to them who had met their end, and, by extension, understood there was something more to life than the day–to–day problems it presented. They, like our ancestors, must have wondered what follows death.

  It’s strange to think that a creature we have always seen as a club-wielding brute was more softhearted than we are. Again and again Neanderthal fossils reveal that these people took immense punishment—yet their wounds often healed, which means that their comrades did not leave them behind even if they were severely injured, but instead kept them in the clan and nursed them back to health.

  It’s not surprising that they were injured. The long hunting spears Neanderthals routinely used weren’t the sort that could be thrown from a distance. (Most anthropologists hold that the Cro–Magnon people invented spear throwing.) Neanderthals instead thrust their long weapons directly into bison or woolly rhinoceros at close range, probably by ambushing them, jumping on their backs, then jamming the spear between their shoulder blades. This was nothing like going to the local grocery. (The hair on woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses could be several inches think and acted almost like armored plating.) If the thrust wasn’t made instantly and accurately, being tossed like a rag doll and then gored would have been a very likely alternative outcome. No wonder their bodies resemble the battered torsos and limbs of broncobusters.

  Personal sorrow aside, for Neanderthals every life lost must have been disastrous. Given their sparse populations, they didn’t have many people to spare, nor, so far as we can tell, did they often live more than thirty years or so. Their productive years were pretty limited. Despite being spread out all across Europe and well into western Asia, genetic information gleaned from a handful of bones indicates that the total population of adult Neanderthals at most reached seventy thousand, and during the last forty thousand years of their existence probably dwindled to ten thousand, until finally they departed for good. Either way, dispersed as they were across tens of thousands of square miles, their clans couldn’t have been large, probably smaller than bands of Native Americans that later roamed the western plains of North America for thousands of years.4 Even meeting other clans must have been rare, and that would have left small groups, hardly more than extended families really, twelve, maybe as many as twenty-five people, fending entirely for themselves for long periods. Between injury, harsh weather, disease, and malnutrition, the whittling of their kind might have been slow, but it was, by all indications, also inexorable, and ultimately lethal.

  Despite their rarity, Neanderthals survived a remarkably long time during a period when the climate was both harsh and unpredictable, fluctuating wildly sometimes within a generation or two, thanks, in part, to multiple volcanic eruptions around the planet. This longevity begs the big question, which is debated, passionately, among paleoanthropologists, exactly how complex was Neanderthal culture and how much did it have to do with their long–term survival?

  At one end of the spectrum, some feel that they weren’t much more advanced than the brutes Boule imagined in the early twentieth century—bereft of religion, language, much clothing, and any symbolic thought. Others speculate that they were as advanced as we were, or nearly so, with full command of some kind of language, poignant self–awareness, symbolic thoughts, and a rich social culture.

  Where they fell along this spectrum probably has a lot to do with language. Without complex language, it’s difficult to share and preserve ideas, whether they involve ceremonies, technologies, survival strategies, or relating what Aunt Marge has been up to. The ability to export an original thought from one mind to other minds has enormous advantages. Not only do good ideas spread rapidly this way, to the benefit of everyone who learns them, but it also increases the chances of the idea’s remaining in the broader culture because more minds have glommed on to them. And once glommed onto, there is always the chance that someone else will improve it. That is one of the ways cultures form to begin with. Were the Neanderthals capable of this?

  Maybe.

  Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at Reading University in England, believes that early humans going back millions of years slowly developed a sense of rhythm, which was later combined with musical sounds that themselves became ways to communicate—soothing their children, winning mates, or motivating themselves. Later Homo erectus, and later still, he argues, Neanderthals, combined these primal musical skills with gesture and a kind of speech to develop a complex communication system he calls hmmmm for “holistic, multi–modal, manipulative, and musical.”

  It’s not implausible. We humans are the only mammal, or primate for that matter, that can tap our feet in time to a rhythm. Powerful selective forces must have been behind the evolution of rhythm for it to become such a unique skill. Our speech is loaded with pauses, starts, and tonal inflections that in the hands of a first–rate orator have a powerful musical quality. Language without tone and inflection is flat, like that of a bad B–movie robot, devoid of feeling, and also, as a result, much of its intent and meaning. It’s the music in our voices, something that scientists call prosody, that gives human language so much of its emotion, humor, and irony. It imbues speech with multiple levels of meaning, many of which we simply “get” without consciously realizing it, another indication that it evolved before words themselves.

  Music is marvelously powerful. Think of the effect a national anthem, a favorite pop song, the climactic close to a Beethoven symphony, or just singing a song with friends can have. (How else can you explain karaoke?) It’s not difficult to see how primal chants might have combined with dance and early rituals to become more complex, and more precise, ways to share feelings, emotions, and ideas once we had evolved brains capable of inventing them, and minds large enough to have need of them.

  Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, remember, split from a common ancestor and went their separate ways for nearly two hundred thousand years before crossing paths again in Europe. It’s quite possible that they wrought sophisticated, but entirely different, methods of communicating the thoughts on their considerable minds. Both we and Neanderthals carry the FOXP2 gene in our chromosomes, a snippet of DNA key to the development of speech (but not the language gene as some have characterized it; there is no language gene). Maybe both species built on a foundation of musical beats and sounds put to use by their common ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, but then, when they parted, evolved different ways to share their thinking. This happens with the color of fur and the shapes of appendages. Why not communication?

  We know the direction we Homo sapiens ultimately took. We combined sound symbols—words—with a certain musicality—prosody—that created a commanding way to both conceptualize thoughts in our minds and then share them with others. This was one of the greatest innovations in all of nature, and it supercharged the growth of human culture.

  Mithen imagines Neanderthals took a different path and evolved a complex combination of iconic gestures (think of the “crazy” gesture we use, an index finger twirling beside our head), songlike sounds to express emotions (more complex versions of the cooing and keening sounds we make), outright song and highly expressive dance movements (à la ballet and Broadway), all in concert to communicate on levels so intricate that they are beyond what we can even imagine.

  These weren’t muddled, caveman efforts to
ape our Homo sapiens language, according to Mithen. He believes and makes a compelling argument that Neanderthals were musical and gestural virtuosos compared with us and the other human species that came before them. While we specialized in using our brains and vocal gifts as ways to deliver packets of symbols made of sound, Neanderthals evolved hyperrefined senses of sound, movement, and emotion.

  One reason they may have evolved this way of communicating is because the physical structure of their skulls and throats developed differently from ours, partly because they were adapted to cold climates, partly by chance. Our heads and necks surround our vocal tracts, and our uniquely shaped skulls house a long, descended tongue uniquely gifted at forming vowels as in see, saw, and sue. Anthropologist Robert McCarthy believes Neanderthals simply couldn’t make these sounds. To explore his theory, he created a synthesized computer model based on reconstructed Neanderthal vocal tracts developed by linguist Philip Lieberman from Brown University.5

  The model pronounces the letter e the way a Neanderthal might have. The result is a sound that is never heard in our speech, a vowel that doesn’t quite sound like an e or an a or an i, but something in between. McCarthy says this shows that Neanderthals could not speak what are known as “quantal” vowels. For us, these vowels provide subtle cues that help speakers with different–size vocal tracts understand one another because they enable a hearer to tune his ear in just such a way that he perceives the sound as it is meant to be heard, a little the way a radio tunes into the right frequency of a particular channel. With quantal vowels it’s not simply the way we say the vowel, but also how we hear it. We learn how to tune in, apparently, when we begin babbling as babies. In fact, this may be one of the primary reasons we babble in infancy at all. We are not simply learning to make language, but learning how to listen to it, too.

  You might not think this could matter much, losing a few vowel sounds. But McCarthy and Lieberman argue that if Neanderthals were unable to attune their voices and hearing to quantal vowels, it would have been impossible for them to distinguish between, for example, the words bit and beat. Instead the Neanderthal e would have been substituted in both. The effect is that they would have had fewer vowels and therefore far fewer words to express ideas, and this would have encouraged our cousin humans to instead build on the more ancient hmmmm approach that Mithen imagines. After all, why would they have created words like bit and beat if they had little use for them in the first place? They would have had no experience of quantal vowels and no more reason to use them than we would recreate the alien speech of a Martian whose body and throat is shaped altogether differently from ours.

  If McCarthy and Mithen are correct, perhaps Neanderthals compensated for a shortage of vowels with an abundance of tones. Maybe the vocabulary, as in Chinese, was based more on inflection and context, less on diphthongs, vowels, and consonants and the symbols these combinations of sounds could represent.

  Neanderthals might also have failed to develop the verbal palette we did because their social world was smaller. Our communication is what makes social interaction rich, and that makes our own mental and emotional lives more elaborate. A less elastic way to express ideas might equate to fewer nuanced ideas emerging from the minds of our big, northern brethren. Could Michelangelo have hoped to paint the richly colored moment of creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel if his palette consisted only of gray, black, and white with a little red? Maybe. We are talking Michelangelo. But it would have been an entirely different image altogether.

  Symbolic language, and more specifically the spoken word, also makes logic more likely. It doesn’t only enable us to store and communicate ideas and thoughts; it shapes and refines the sorts of ideas and thoughts we have in the first place. Without more refined language, maybe the Neanderthals’ worldview was less logical, and more dreamlike, almost surrealistic. When we dream, the dream always makes sense within the context of the dream, even though when we recall dreams after we awake, we know that flying, and time travel, and the different versions of ourselves and others in the dream aren’t possible in the “real” world. Did the daily awakened life of Neanderthals possess more of this kind of ephemeral, nearly surrealistic quality? We ourselves touch on the mystical, the surrealistic, and the metaphysical in meditation, religious trances, and hypnosis. And doesn’t dance and music sometimes bring people to a mystical, trancelike state? If we can come to these states, perhaps Neanderthals did, too, and then some, given the way they perceived the world. It makes you wonder what Neanderthal dreams might have been like. And it makes you wonder how accurate our “reality” is.

  Not that any of this means that Neanderthals were less adept at the undertakings necessary to their survival. Mithen believes that they had plenty of “domain specific” intelligence characterized by the tools they made, the hunts they organized, and the food they prepared, but there is little evidence so far that they wove ideas into a broad culture filled with story and myth.

  Their small numbers might have hindered their proclivities and talents. There couldn’t have been much cross–pollination of ideas among separate groups. Mithen even wonders if they developed hmmmm “dialects” specific to their own clans. Each group would have been like an out–of–the way island, rarely found. Given their dialects and the rarity of chance meetings, technical and social progress would have been stunted. In the long run that would have made the rise of sophisticated culture difficult.

  This may explain why the more closely anthropologists have explored Neanderthal culture, the more they have noticed something odd. For all of their dogged courage and resilience, they didn’t make much technological progress during their two–hundred–thousand-year run in Europe. The Mousterian tools and cultural artifacts they crafted and left behind show remarkably little innovation considering how long they were around. The craftsmanship is first–rate, and the design of the tools and the methods used to fashion them were clearly passed along quite precisely, but given their intelligence, you would have expected more novelty, more originality.

  Their greatest technical breakthroughs seem to have come after they first crossed paths with the Cro–Magnon people. This could be coincidence or it could illustrate what they might have accomplished if they had been able to better share ideas among themselves. Or it could mean their sparse numbers and the limitations of their language hampered the two species’ ability to interact once they finally and fatefully met.

  Imagine this encounter, and its shattering effect. Each group must have gazed at the other in bewildered amazement. In an instant they would have seen that these creatures resembled them, but were clearly not one of them. Why didn’t they communicate in the same way or even make the same sounds? This wasn’t simply a different tribe that dressed in unfamiliar apparel, spoke an indecipherable language, or carried odd weapons. This was another creature altogether, perhaps a god or an animal or something in between. To the Cro–Magnon (see sidebar p. 114), the large–muscled, beetle–browed white people with their fiery hair must have struck them as alien, and possibly dangerous. To the broad–backed Neanderthals, the slim creatures with their baby faces and rounded skulls might have looked slight, childlike, and at first glance weak. But the Neanderthals may have sensed danger, too, in the sophisticated weapons the strangers carried, and in the alien precision of their communication. Chances are the Neanderthals had seen the handiwork of those weapons long before they met face–to–face the creatures who had fashioned them. The evidence of such efficient killing must have had a chilling effect.

  The big and primal question—the mastodon in the room so to speak—that had to have entered both of their collective minds was, whoever they are, can they be trusted? Are they a friend or an enemy?

  For twenty-five thousand years, nearly three times longer than we have been recording our own history, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shared the same part of the world. Over time, and as the Cro–Magnon people wandered deeper into Europe, the species must have met again and again. Did th
ey cooperate or wage war or simply do their level best to ignore one another while each worked desperately to stay beyond death’s long reach?

  Who Were the Cro–Magnon People?

  The term Cro–Magnon can be a little confusing because it originates from a French cave, Abri de Cro–Magnon, in southwestern France, where the first fossils were found, but actually refers to the dark–skinned people whose ancestors began migrating from Africa around fifty thousand years ago. These were the earliest Homo sapiens to reach Western Europe, and the people who first encountered and then coexisted with Neanderthals in places we now know as France and Spain beginning some forty thousand years ago.

  As you might imagine, the Cro–Magnon were a tough group. Strong, heavily muscled, and smart with a brain, at 1600 cc, larger than ours is today. Their tall foreheads and square jaws made them the first humans (as far as we know) to bring these neotenic features with them into their adulthood, the physical hallmarks of modern Homo sapiens.

  They were clearly successful. Their genes are evident in people living today from Europe to Central Asia and North Africa, Polynesia and both American continents. In short, nearly all of us. Their weaponry was advanced and included the invention of bone spear throwers that held their spears as they launched them at prey (and likely one another on occasion) with a force and accuracy that made them the most lethal hunters on earth. They also excelled in fashioning extremely sharp flint knife blades and spearheads. They even developed techniques for straightening their spears to make their flight more true. They liked to decorate their weapons, too, but discoveries of these small examples of their flair for the artistic were only a small indication of their ingenuity. The world learned of the true depth of their creative talents in 1940 when four curious teenage boys, and their dog, Robot, stumbled upon arrays of mysterious paintings on the walls of the Lascaux caves in France’s Dordogne region.