Masters of the Planet

by Ian Tattersall

  This observation fit well with the abundance of butchered herbivore remains typically found at Neanderthal sites. But the ultimate observation came in 2005, when a French team found an extremely high 15N/14N ratio in the bones of a very late Neanderthal from a place called St.-Césaire. Since this value was well above what they had found even in hyenas from the same site, the scientists suggested that the only way in which Neanderthals could possibly have achieved such a high ratio was by specializing in the consumption of herbivores that were themselves enriched in 15N. And the only putative victims were among the most intimidating of the many large beasts roaming the landscape: namely, mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. What is more, the French scientists suggested that it would not have been possible for the St.-Césaire Neanderthals to have scavenged all the mammoth and rhino carcasses that would have been necessary to sustain the high nitrogen isotope ratios they had found in the hominids’ bones. In their view, the hominids must have actively hunted the huge mammals, presumably as an important component of a long-standing dietary tradition. The case seems pretty strong, then, that Neanderthals were redoubtable hunters who, even at low population densities, were able to tackle some of the most formidable prey around. At their living sites they routinely controlled fire in hearths; and these fires doubtless provided a focus of their social activities, besides furnishing a means for cooking all that meat and for discouraging unwanted predators.

  Still, it’s important not to forget that plant foods must have played a significant role in the Neanderthals’ diets in most places and at most times. This aspect of their food intake has been predictably neglected because plant remains rot rapidly, and rarely preserve in the archaeological record. However, scientific ingenuity is beginning to open up some amazing new avenues for investigation. For example, a recent report describes plant microfossils (both starch grains and phytoliths, tiny rigid bodies that occur in plant roots, leaves, and stems, and differ according to plant species) that were recovered from the plaque coating Neanderthal teeth from two famous sites. A dentist’s nightmare had become a treasure trove for paleoanthropologists. One of the sites in question is the cave of Shanidar in northern Iraq, and the specimen examined dates from about 46 thousand years ago. Shanidar is, by the way, the site that has famously yielded the skeleton of an aged male Neanderthal with a withered arm. This appendage must have been useless to its possessor for most of his long life, and his survival has elicited speculation that he enjoyed the sustained support of his social group. The other site is the Belgian cave of Spy which, at about ten thousand years younger, falls very late in Neanderthal history.

  Though far apart in time and space, and representing environments ranging from Mediterranean to cool temperate, the two caves tell similar stories. In both places the Neanderthals consumed a wide variety of plant foods that reflected the range of resources available in the local environment. There was no indication of specialization on particular plants, but in both places many of the foods would have required some preparation prior to consumption, and some starchy plant parts had indeed been cooked to render them more edible. There is, by the way, no contradiction between extensive consumption of starches and the nitrogen isotope record, because the isotopes only register the consumption of meat and of plant foods that are high in protein. At Shanidar the foods indicated by the microfossils include dates, barley, and legumes— items that would have been ready for harvesting at different times of year, thus indicating that foraging for plant foods was a year-round activity. All in all, this new study shows us that the essentials of the modern hunting-gathering style of subsistence had been established by the time the Neanderthals had entered the picture. Like Homo sapiens today, Homo neanderthalensis was an opportunistic omnivore, reminding us that despite our secondary adoption of a predatory lifestyle, we have never entirely put behind us our ancient vegetarian heritage.

  NEANDERTHAL LIFESTYLES

  Apart from being small, we didn’t know until very recently what those Neanderthal groups that sat around the fire cooking their food were actually like. All we had as a basis to speculate on the subject were stone artifacts and broken bones, and the ways in which these were scattered around living sites. This scattering was typically (though not invariably) random, with little suggestion that the living space was divided into areas for specific activities such as butchery, stone knapping, sleeping, eating, and so forth. We routinely find such division of space at sites left by fully symbolic modern humans, so there is already some suggestion of different approaches to domestic life by the two species. But until recently, there hasn’t been much to tell us how Neanderthal groups were organized. Now a team of Spanish researchers, working at the 50-thousand year-old Neanderthal site of El Sidrón, has come up with some intriguing suggestions based on both physical and molecular evidence.

  The El Sidrón site itself is a long and complex warren of tunnels produced in the surrounding limestone by an ancient underground river system, and it has a complex history. Most notably, an extensive assemblage of Neanderthal bones was deposited in a single event on the bottom of one arm of the cave, when the ground surface above (or, just possibly, the floor of a higher tunnel) collapsed into the cavity below. Large numbers of knapped stones were intermixed with fossil bones and other debris. Many of the fragments could be refitted into complete cobbles, suggesting that the spot where the collapse occurred was a place where stone tools were made. The 1,800 fossil fragments found in the debris represent the broken-up remains of twelve Neanderthal individuals: six adults, three adolescents, two juveniles, and an infant. All appear to have already been dead when the collapse occurred, not long after their decease. More remarkably, not only had these Neanderthals been dead, but the researchers conclude that they had been the victims of a massacre, since many of the bones show marks of cutting and percussion consistent with defleshing, and probably cannibalism.

  Evidence of defleshing is not uncommon on Neanderthal (and even Homo heidelbergensis) bones, and many scientists have argued that removal of flesh from corpses after death is not necessarily proof of cannibalism; but the case made that the hominid bones at El Sidrón were broken for consumption is a compelling one, and the probability seems to be growing that this behavior was indeed part of the Neanderthal repertoire. Interestingly, the El Sidrón researchers think that, in contrast to the “gastronomic cannibalism” seen at the Gran Dolina (i.e., cannibalism occasioned by habit, rather than by necessity), the El Sidrón Neanderthals were the victims of “survival cannibalism.” In support of this they point to the fact that the fossil remains bear clear signs of environmental stress, mainly in the form of an abundance of those defects in dental enamel formation that were notably rare at the Sima de los Huesos. If dietary stress was indeed a significant issue for these hominids, then it is likely that competition among contiguous Neanderthal groups for available resources was strong. Putting the various lines of evidence together, the researchers conclude that the twelve El Sidrón Neanderthals all belonged to a single social group that had been ambushed, killed, and consumed by another.

  Two further observations support the notion that an entire Neanderthal group had perished in the El Sidrón event. One of these is that a group size of twelve, with a few adults of each sex and children of all ages, is pretty much in line with what you might expect. Specific estimates of Neanderthal group sizes are few and far between, but one recent study at the 55-thousand-year-old Spanish Neanderthal site of Abric Romaní concluded that groups occupying the rock shelter had varied in size from eight to ten individuals. If the Abric Romaní inhabitants were typical, and the estimates of their group sizes are accurate, it’s even possible that the twelve individuals from El Sidrón belonged to a largish social unit by Neanderthal standards.

  Still, wherever this band stood in the size spectrum, the notion that it constituted a single social unit was supported by analysis of its members’ mtDNA, which had been excellently preserved in the cool conditions within the cave. For a start, diversity a
mong the El Sidrón mtDNA genomes was very low, consistent with a family group. But most revealing was the finding that the three El Sidrón adult males had all belonged to the same mtDNA lineage, while each of the females had belonged to a different one. And here, for the first time, is a potential (though not definitive) message about the social organization of Neanderthals: that the El Sidrón males had remained in their birth group, while the females had married out of theirs, being dispatched at or soon after puberty to join a neighboring band. As one scientific colleague was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “I cannot help but suppose that Neanderthal girls wept as bitterly as modern girls, faced by the prospect of leaving close family on their ‘wedding’ day.” This may be anthropomorphizing a bit—and it is certainly true that impassive female transfer is not that uncommon among primates—but it is difficult not to respond to the sentiment.

  The inferences made by the El Sidrón researchers about Neanderthal society do not stop there. They note that a five- to six-year-old child and a three- to four-year-old were probably offspring of the same adult female. This suggests a birth interval of around three years, consistent with what was historically seen among hunter-gathering peoples. This in turn implies that Neanderthals achieved prolonged inhibition of ovulation, most plausibly through the expedient of protracted breastfeeding. An imaginative further conjecture comes from the material from which the El Sidrón stone tools were made: the nearest place at which it could be obtained was several miles away. Perhaps, the researchers speculated, the El Sidrón Neanderthals had incurred the wrath of the neighboring group into whose territory they had forayed to obtain it, and paid a heavy price in a reprisal raid.

  Taken together, all of this tantalizing evidence from El Sidrón is helping create a more visceral picture of the Neanderthals than we ever had before. Knowing from high-tech laboratory analyses that tiny numbers of Neanderthals heroically hunted mammoths out on the tundra certainly evokes our admiration of these hardy and resourceful hominids. But this kind of information is profoundly different from contemplating the historical vignette of Neanderthal life—and death—with which El Sidrón presents us. The vision of a peacefully stone-knapping extended family of Neanderthals being raided, murdered, butchered, and eaten by a marauding group of their fellows is an unsettling one in the extreme; but then again, it is possibly not so different from what every modern watcher of crime-scene television is by now inured to.

  On the more humane side, one of the reasons we have such a good sampling of reasonably intact Neanderthal remains is that these hominids at least occasionally buried their dead. And while it has been argued both that the presumed burials never occurred, and that they not only occurred but sometimes contained grave goods, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between. Yes, the Neanderthals did invent the practice of burial; and no, there is no really convincing evidence that they ever did so with the ritual that typically accompanies modern human burials. Much as we want to see echoes of ourselves in this practice (which Neanderthals apparently invented before our ancestors did), it is impossible to know whether or not Neanderthal burials were overlarded with all of the symbolic baggage with which ours are. That they imply some sort of deep empathetic feeling seems close to certain; but in the broader context of what we know about Neanderthals, it is far less probable that they imply belief in an afterlife—something that would indeed demand symbolic cognitive abilities.

  NEANDERTHALS AND MATERIALS

  By the time diagnostic Neanderthal remains are known in Europe, the stone-working tradition known as the “Mousterian,” using variants of the prepared-core technique, had become entrenched. Indeed, in Europe the Mousterian is virtually synonymous with Homo neanderthalensis, although a very similar toolkit was also produced by other hominids in North Africa and the Levant. The most characteristic implements of the Mousterian are modestly sized sharp points and convex-sided scrapers, or even small teardrop handaxes made on flakes; but the number of variations is endless. This may not, however, have been through the toolmakers’ specific intention. For while more than 50 distinct Mousterian tool forms were defined by mid-twentieth-century archaeologists, more recent researchers have recognized that there is in fact more of a continuum of form. This is due to a complex and discontinuous sequence of actions, as flakes made from superior materials were continually resharpened to maintain their functionality. Indeed, it was cleanly and predictably fracturing rocks themselves that were the key to making the best Mousterian tools. Good materials were evidently highly prized and regularly sought far afield, showing how valuable they were. Not infrequently, the nearest source of the rock used to make at least some of the tools found at Mousterian sites was many miles away—hence the speculation over the fate of those unfortunate Neanderthals at El Sidrón.

  The need for good materials was occasioned by the Mousterians’ sheer skill, for they were gifted stoneworkers who disdained poor materials, only making crude implements out of them when—as was frequently the case—there was no alternative. The Neanderthals instinctively knew stone, as a modern cabinetmaker instinctively knows wood. And while a piece of silicified limestone might be good enough for producing a simple flake meant to be used only until its edge went blunt, the Mousterians carefully fashioned a good piece of flint or chert, then gave it a new edge over and over again until it was too small to be of further use. The discovery of scraping tools or points bearing traces of resin confirms that Neanderthals often set such tools into wooden handles, or used them as spear tips, binding them in position with leather thongs or sinews. The Mousterian toolkit was clearly the product of intelligent and dexterous beings.

  Mousterian flint tools made by Neanderthals at various sites in France. These skillfully shaped tools include two small handaxes, two scrapers, and a point, all made on stone flakes using the prepared-core approach. Photo by Ian Tattersall.

  Yet perhaps not beings just like us. Despite their frequent beauty, and for all the skill that went into making them, Mousterian tools showed a certain monotony over all the vast area that the Neanderthals inhabited. Several varieties of the Mousterian have been named, and are still recognized. But uniformity in concept was the rule of the day, and it’s likely that the minor variations we do see in Neanderthal toolkits broadly reflect local differences in activity due to differential availability of resources, or occasionally to some refinement over time, rather than to the experimentation with different ways of doing things you’d expect to find among geographically scattered modern people. What’s more, while they hafted stone tools into wood, Neanderthals rarely seem to have made tools of other soft materials. Bone and antler are plentiful at Neanderthal sites, and were abundantly fashioned into artifacts by later Europeans. But the Mousterian toolmakers rarely took advantage of these materials—although one of the rare examples of a Mousterian bone tool, from the 50-thousand-year-old site of La Quina and evidently used for the purpose of retouching stone tools, appears to have been made from a piece of hominid cranium. In this case and in others, the Mousterians bashed bones as though they were stones, with none of the sensitivity to the special mechanical properties of soft materials shown by their successors. In short, spectacular as it was, Neanderthal craftsmanship was pretty stereotyped.

  The upshot of all of this is that we find nothing in the technological record of the Neanderthals to suggest that they were symbolic thinkers. Skillful, yes; complex, certainly. But not in the way that we are. As a species, Homo neanderthalensis seems to have fully participated in the hominid trend over time toward more challenging behaviors, and toward more subtle and intricate relationships with the environment. It certainly participated in the hominid trend toward bigger brains, possibly taking this tendency to its most extreme expression. But behaviorally there was no qualitative break with the past; the Neanderthals were simply doing what their predecessors had done, if apparently better. In other words, they were like their ancestors, only more so. We are not. We are symbolic.

  ELEVEN

 
ARCHAIC AND MODERN

  Stone implements and their means of manufacture are hardly ironclad proxies for symbolic thought processes on the part of the toolmakers; and indeed it can be argued that we know of little if anything in Old Stone Age technology that could demonstrate such mental processes. Throughout this period, with few exceptions, we can confidently infer symbolic intent only from overtly symbolic objects, or from the results of explicitly symbolic actions. Of course, identifying such expressions is more easily said than done. Burial, as we have seen, may well have other motivations. And despite the fact that ochre was widely used in symbolic contexts by later people, there is no evident reason why the well-documented grinding of pigments that took place at various Neanderthal sites need necessarily imply intent of this kind. Even recognizing “symbolic” objects can be a tough call. A cave wall decorated with lively animal images leaves no doubts; but given that if you sufficiently desire to you may interpret a wide variety of scratches and other strange markings as symbolic, this can become a very gray area indeed.

  With the Neanderthals we find ourselves at best somewhere toward the more dubious end of that gray area. And it must surely be significant that, from the entire expanse of time and space the Neanderthals inhabited, we have nothing that we can both confidently associate with them and unambiguously interpret as a piece demonstrating modern cognitive processes. There is certainly the odd straw in the wind, and a few uncertain objects are known that scientists argue about. But this is hardly unexpected in a record left behind by a big-brained close human relative that clearly displayed complex behavior patterns. What is almost certainly more telling than such putative flashes of the symbolic spirit, is that there is no substantive evidence that our style of thinking and its expression were routine aspects of Neanderthal consciousness or Neanderthal societies.