by Paul Jordan
NEANDERTHAL
NEANDERTHAL
NEANDERTHAL MAN AND THE STORY OF HUMAN ORIGINS
PAUL JORDAN
First published in 1999 by Sutton Publishing
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Paul Jordan, 1999, 2013
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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9480 7
Original typesetting by The History Press
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction – The Man from Newmandale
1 The Discovery of Neanderthal Man
2 Neanderthal Man Abroad
3 Neanderthal Man in the Twentieth Century
4 Neanderthal Types
5 The World of the Neanderthalers
6 Neanderthal Technology
7 The Neanderthal Way of Life
8 Before Neanderthal Man
9 From Apes to Hominids
10 The Human Line
11 The Emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens
12 Neanderthal Nemesis
13 Epilogue
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Robert Foley of the Department of Biological Anthropology, Cambridge University, for his generous permission to photograph the casts in the department’s collection, and his assistant Maggie Bellatti for her help with the photography. All photographs were taken by the author unless otherwise stated – particular thanks go to the Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Germany, for their colour pictures. Thanks are also due to Dr John Wymer for the use of his drawing of the Molodova finds and to Chicago University Press for permission to reproduce the jaw picture from The Middle Stone Age at Klasies River Mouth by Ronald Singer and John Wymer. Special thanks go to Professor Paul Mellars of Cambridge University for many helpful conversations in the course of writing this book.
List of illustrations
Black and White Illustrations
Lyell’s sketch of the Feldhof caves in the Neanderthal.
In black, the bones found in the Neanderthal cave.
The skullcap from the Neanderthal.
One of the skull pieces from Engis.
The Gibraltar skull.
Side view of the Neanderthal skullcap showing ‘bun’ at the back and heavy brows at the front.
One of the skulls from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter.
Tentative reconstructions sketched by the discoverers of the Spy remains.
Neanderthal bones from Spy.
Broken bones from Krapina.
The skullcap from Java, very constricted when seen from above behind the heavy brows.
The Mauer jaw.
The much-travelled skull from le Moustier.
Excavator’s section at la Chapelle aux Saints, with the Neanderthal grave.
Skull of the ‘old man’ of la Chapelle.
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Homo sapiens sapiens.
The man from la Chapelle as envisaged by the Illustrated London News in 1909.
Neanderthal vertebrae.
The discovery at Broken Hill.
The separated skull, jaw and brain cast pieces of the ‘Taung Baby’.
Skull fragment from Zuttiyeh.
The Steinheim skull.
The Swanscombe fragments.
Neanderthal child burial at Teshik Tash (skull fragments in black) with goats’ horns around (grey).
Reconstruction of the skull of ‘Peking Man’.
Neanderthal Man washed and brushed up for the New York subway in the 1930s, according to Professor Carleton S. Coon.
A Neanderthal child’s jaw from Gibraltar, with the Gibraltar woman’s skull in the background.
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.
The different shapes of modern (left) and Neanderthal (right) brains.
The heavy brow-ridges, swept-back cheeks and broad nasal base of the Neanderthal face.
A teaching model of a Neanderthal skull illustrates, along with brow-ridges and bun, the mid-face prognathism and chinless right-angled lower jaw of the type.
The Neanderthalers’ typical retromolar gap.
The differing vocal tracts of the Neanderthalers (left) and moderns (right).
The back of a Neanderthal skull, showing the depression of the suprainiac fossa where neck muscles were attached.
The adult male Neanderthaler from Amud.
The range of the Neanderthalers, with some of the principal sites mentioned in this book.
Molodova’s ring of mammoth bones, with reconstruction drawing of a possible tent represented by the archaeological remains; with thanks to Dr John Wymer.
Mousterian stone tools.
Wood spear tip from Clacton.
Reconstruction of the burial at la Chapelle aux Saints .
The infant Neanderthaler’s jaw from Amud, with the later adult male’s skull behind.
The Neanderthal cemetery at la Ferrassie.
The marked slab that covered a Neanderthal child’s grave at la Ferrassie.
The underside of the skull from Montecirceo, with enlarged opening to the neck.
Possibly non-utilitarian markings on pieces from Mousterian sites: Abri Souard above, Quneitra below.
The Tabun Neanderthal woman’s skull.
Pre-Mousterian flake tools, Tayacian above, Clactonian below.
One of the Ehringsdorf skulls.
The Steinheim skull.
The back of the assembled Swanscombe fragments.
The skull from Petralona.
The skull from the Caune de l’Arago, Tautavel.
The Mauer jaw.
A fine Acheulian hand-axe.
Aegyptopithecus.
Proconsul.
Skull of a chimpanzee.
The Lothagam mandible fragment.
An ape’s skull needs strong musculature to support it on its inclined spine.
A human skull balances on top of its upright spine.
An Australopithecine dental arcade, not as parabolically open as humans’ are, with large molars but reduced canines.
Australopithecine footprints from Laetoli.
Australopithecine spinal, pelvic and limb bones.
Reconstructed skull of a gracile Australopithecine.
A robust Australopithecine with keeled skull top and massive jaw.
An Oldowan pebble tool.
Homo habilis.
Homo habilis (right) with ‘1470’, which may represent another related but more evolved species.
‘1470’.
The remains of the ‘Nariokotome Boy’.
The skeleton from Nariokotome.
A specimen of Homo ergaster.
An Acheulian hand-axe.
Skullcap from Zhoukoudian.<
br />
Skullcap from Java.
The face from Bodo.
The Kabwe skull.
Omo II.
The Ngaloba skull.
A reconstruction of the Florisbad skull fragments.
Rear view of the Jebel Ihroud skull.
The face of Jebel Ihroud.
A jaw from Klasies River Mouth.
Model of the bones of Skhul V as found by excavation.
The Tabun Neanderthal woman’s skull.
A modern-looking child’s skull from Qafzeh.
The Neanderthal male of Amud.
The adult male Skhul V: rugged but non- Neanderthal, despite the heavy brow-ridges.
Skhul V from the back, with a modern sort of breadth and height, giving the ‘tin loaf’ look.
A blade core and blade from Klasies River Mouth.
Harpoons from Katanda.
Aurignacian blades and scrapers (the longest about 5 cm).
An Aurignacian split-base bone point.
A skull from Mladec, with something of a bun at the rear, but high and straight-sided when seen from the back.
An adult male from Predmosti.
The old man’s skull from Cro-Magnon, back view.
Chatelperronian knives.
Hut emplacement at Arcy with stones, mammoth bones, post holes (black) and hearths (hatched areas).
Gravettian artefacts.
Solutrean artefacts.
Magdalenian harpoons.
The venus of Willendorf, Austria.
Colour plates
(between pp. 112 and 113)
Dardé’s imaginative statue of Neanderthal Man at the museum of les Eyzies.
A modern reconstruction of a Neanderthaler in the new Neanderthal Museum at Mettman in Germany.
Neanderthal home-life as portrayed at the new Neanderthal Museum at Mettman in Germany.
The bellowing, drinking mammoth of le Thot near Lascaux in the Dordogne.
The woolly rhino at Préhisto-Parc near les Eyzies in the Dordogne.
Reindeer and wolves at Préhisto-Parc.
European bison at le Thot.
Przewalski’s horse – the ice age type with distinctive mane – at le Thot.
Préhisto-Parc’s fearsome cave-bear.
A cave lion menaces a Neanderthaler at Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthal Man looks out at dusk from the museum terrace of les Eyzies in France.
The Vezère river near le Moustier, with limestone cliffs and caves.
Caves at Mount Carmel in Israel.
Neanderthalers in at the kill at Préhisto-Parc.
Coming home from the hunt through the woods of Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthalers at home in Préhisto-Parc.
A Neanderthal hunting band traps a mammoth at Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthalers take on a giant elk in a glade of Préhisto-Parc.
The site of the burials at Regourdou.
Brown bears are still in residence at Regourdou.
A Neanderthal family faces up to a cave-bear in a reconstruction at Roque Saint-Christophe in the Dordogne.
Horses were frequently painted and carved in the Upper Palaeolithic art.
Neanderthal Man gazes from the terrace of the les Eyzies museum at gathering autumn mists across the Vezère valley.
Introduction
The Man from Newmandale
The very name ‘Neanderthal’ makes an impact all by itself – and so, if you prefer it, does ‘Neandertal’, without the ‘h’. The branch of fate that determines the names (and thereby the flavours) assigned to our various remote ancestors and the productions they left behind them – Crô-Magnon, Magdalenian, Oldowan, Heidelberg and all the rest – has endowed Neanderthal Man with the most flavourful name of them all. Germanic but with more than a hint of the classical, the name looks strong on the page and, however pronounced, sounds as strong to the ear. Especially when mispronounced by English-speakers, it carries a powerful charge of primitive and cloddish associations: ‘knee-and-earthal’, a fitting name for the bent and shuffling cave-man, hardly risen up out of the mud, that popular imagination still too often imagines Neanderthal Man to have been. ‘Nayandertaal’ sounds cleaner altogether. Because the name starts with ‘N’ and contains (at least in its older spelling) the ‘th’ combination, a surprisingly large number of people go on to confuse Neanderthal Man with the Neolithic period, to the detriment of the latter, imagining that innovative time of the first farmers to have been the heyday of the shuffling cavemen. In fact, the last of the Neanderthal people missed the Neolithic by more than twenty thousand years.
The German spelling reforms at the start of the twentieth century removed the ‘h’ from Thal and so from the name of the dale in North Rhine–Westphalia after which Neanderthal Man was called. By then, the scientific world was committed to the classification Homo neanderthalensis with the ‘h’ in place, but we are at liberty to write either Neanderthal or Neandertal in common usage concerning this fossil man. With its nineteenth-century echoes of the beginnings of scientific anthropology, ‘Neanderthal’ appeals, but there’s no doubt that ‘Neandertal’ would help English speakers to pronounce the name more accurately: most American and Continental writers prefer it, but the British often stick with Neanderthal.
The Neander Dale was an appropriate place in which to find the first correctly identified remains of an earlier form of Man, distinct from the modern worldwide species Homo sapiens sapiens. The old bones from the Neandertal were evidence of a form of Man new to science in the middle of the nineteenth century: a New Man indeed for the contemplation of both the scientific and the wider world of the time. A nice turn of fate, then, that this New Man should have been discovered in a valley named, circuitously, after a ‘new man’ of the seventeenth century, who came from a family with the unremarkable name of Neumann (Newman in English). He was the vicar of St Martin’s, Düsseldorf, where he was also the organist, and a composer of hymns. As we could expect of a clergyman of his time, he was a classical scholar, too, and headmaster of the town’s Latin College. He chose to use a Graecized form of his name for his hymn-writing, and you can come across Neander in hymn books to this day. In his late twenties, he often liked to pass his time, composing no doubt, in a particular little valley close to his home and the locals soon called the place after him, Neanderthal = Newmandale. And when the bones discovered in a quarry in the valley in 1856 came to be assigned to ‘Neanderthal Man’, a New Man in the human story was recognized for the first time.
Nearly 150 years after his first discovery, the New Man from the Neanderthal may sometimes seem a bit old hat now, overshadowed by the more recent discoveries of much older and much more primitive types like Homo erectus (first encountered in Java and China) and the early men and pre-men of East and Southern Africa. A lot more New Men and Near Men and Ape Men have come on the scene since Neanderthal Man put in his first appearance. These more recent arrivals have rightly had their due since they belong to the very early and crucial epochs of human evolution, when the first decisive steps towards ‘hominization’ or ‘anthropogenesis’ were taken, without which we would not be here to be interested in our origins. But interest, including scientific interest, in those earliest phases of the human story has perhaps reached the point where the newcomers – who continue to back into the limelight, especially on the very old sites of East Africa – have too far upstaged the old hands like Neanderthal Man, who still has a lot to tell us about the mysteries of the origin and nature of fully modern man: precisely because he is closer to us by far than the ape-men and early men of Africa and elsewhere – closer, but not the same. For Neanderthal Man is the real alien with whom the human race was once in contact, in circumstances over which there has been a great deal of scholarly debate. Our popular culture is obsessed with the idea of aliens from outer space, endowed with intelligence and purpose (often hostile) but skewed away from us in some essential way, different in outlook and desire. It is highly unlikely, to say the least, that any ali
ens from outer space have ever come anywhere near our Earth, but it is certain that human beings of the modern sort (that is to say representatives of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, to which every member of the human race today belongs) have in the not so remote past shared parts of the world with forms of human being significantly different from themselves, both physically and, it must be, psychologically too. The Neanderthalers of Europe and Western Asia are the type par excellence of this sort of alien neighbour. How different they were has recently been a matter of fierce debate among anthropologists and up to a point may always be so, but for the moment a trend in thinking fuelled by new evidence from the field of genetics is unmistakably pointing in a particular direction. So on the grounds both of the new scientific evidence and of this particular fossil man’s perennial capacity to throw light on our own nature and origin, a fresh account of the life and times of Neanderthal Man may be timely.
Overview accounts of human evolution, even those written by the anthropologists and archaeologists themselves, often reach Neanderthal Man with a slight but discernible weariness of spirits after the initial excitements of the African ape-men, followed by the expansive exploits of Homo erectus. Particularly, perhaps, for those writers already convinced that Neanderthal Man was a byway of human evolution, a dull dead-ender, the Neanderthal epoch looms with a certain boredom, before things look up again with the triumph of modern man in the shape of the cave artists of the last ice age. This book sets out to put Neanderthal Man centre stage, with of course enough of the background story of human evolution to make sense of him – especially in relationship with the emergence of modern man. It isn’t the first book to focus on Neanderthal Man and several excellent works are cited in the bibliography, but it does try to be up to date with the crucial genetic evidence and with the vital studies of human mental evolution that, despite their interest and importance for us all, are only now being undertaken – with all their inevitable difficulties and uncertainties.
This book does not aspire to any startling originality: there are no facts and scarcely any interpretations of fact related in it that do not derive from the works of a host of scholars and specialists. Some justice to their labours and insights the writer hopes is done in the bibliographical listings at the back of the book; the authors’ names found there record some of the discoverers of the facts and originators of the interpretations discussed here. If those discoverers and originators are not credited with their work line by line, it is certainly not so as to deny them their due but rather so as to be able to present an unbroken and impersonalized account of the material under discussion. Some highly personalized treatments of the scientific inquiry into human evolution have been published, to deserved success: it is often valuable to know what sort of people are engaged in the study and how they go about it, and the story of the ups and downs of controversy makes for colourful reading; the personalized approach also takes care of the aforementioned problem of scholarly acknowledgements and does away with the need for any apparatus of notes. But this book sets out to highlight above all the ideas involved in the study of human evolution, particularly in that latter part of it when the first modern sort of human being and his striking contemporary, Neanderthal Man, were coming on the scene. To present those ideas as vividly as possibly, personalities (and text notes) have been eschewed. This is an account for the interested layperson of the issues involved in the latest and, to us, most important phase of human evolution.
