Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  All this evidence, taken together with the persuasive publication of Darwin’s work in that same year, predisposed many in Britain to welcome the news from the Neanderthal. Darwin had rather coyly mentioned at the end of his book that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’ and left it at that, in accordance with his remark to Wallace late in 1857 that he thought he would avoid the whole subject of human evolution ‘as so surrounded with prejudices’. But the implications for humanity of Darwin’s work were apparent to all who took it seriously, and enthusiasts for evolution fell on the Neanderthal bones with relish. Darwin’s champion Thomas Huxley described the Neanderthal skullcap as ‘the most ape-like human skull I have ever seen’, but, lecturing with the title ‘Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature’ in 1863, he was at the same time keen to emphasize that the Neanderthal specimen was no ape-man from the earliest times of human evolution: ‘though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls . . . the fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has, probably, become what he is.’ In other words, Huxley could see that Neanderthal might be just a bit ape-like, but he was nowhere near the bottom end of the progression from ape to man. In fact, with some foresight given the paucity of fossils of ancient humanity, Huxley considered Neanderthal Man to be but an extreme form of Homo sapiens – many recent workers have come to the same conclusion, making the Neanderthalers a subspecies with the full scientific name of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Ironically, Homo neanderthalensis was coined in 1863 by Professor William King of Queen’s College, Galway, who from the first did not consider Neanderthal Man to be Homo sapiens at all, finding him ‘eminently simial’, and went on later to want to exclude him from the genus Homo altogether. That would be unthinkable today, but the new genetic evidence so far available has certainly been interpreted to distance Neanderthal Man far from our own line of descent. King held Neanderthal Man’s brain-box in low esteem and ‘felt constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute’. And there were those in Britain too who followed the German academic establishment in dismissing Neanderthal Man as a merely pathological specimen, a rachitic or an idiot. One English commentator on the find came up with a very colourful dismissal: ‘It may have been one of those wild men, half-crazed, half-idiotic, cruel and strong, who are always more or less to be found on the outskirts of barbarous tribes, and who now and then appear in civilized communities to be consigned perhaps to the penitentiary or gallows, when their murderous propensities manifest themselves.’

  Darwin himself, though he took up the challenge of human evolution in due course, was never very interested in the details of the recent course of that evolution and made little of the Neanderthal remains or those of other Neanderthalers that came to light in his lifetime. He preferred to theorize about the earliest phases of human evolution and was the pioneering advocate of Africa as the likely starting point of the human story, an idea that is well to the fore today.

  In 1864 the English translator of Schaafhausen’s paper, Professor Busk of the Royal College of Surgeons, resurrected the Gibraltar skull, which had been sent to him a year or two before, after its sojourn of more than a decade in the Gibraltar Museum. This very complete woman’s skull closely resembled the surviving cap of the Neanderthal cranium and, carrying as it did the whole facial area missing in the Neanderthal specimen, made it possible to form a better idea of its human status than was the case with the Neanderthal relic alone. Busk, with Falconer who proposed the name Homo calpicus for the find, saw in Gibraltar Woman another sort of humanity, different from our own, ‘very low and savage, and of extreme antiquity – but still man, and not a halfway step between man and monkey’. In this view, they lined up with Huxley’s view of Neanderthal Man. At this stage in the study of the physical remains of human evolution, with so very few specimens to go on and no way of arriving at even relative datings for the material, the now obvious kinship between Gibraltar Woman and Neanderthal Man was not, perhaps, as apparent as it is today, when so many more individuals of the Neanderthal people have been found and studied. (As a matter of fact, Gibraltar Woman is probably an older Neanderthaler than Neanderthal Man himself.) For Busk, Huxley, Darwin, Schaafhausen and all the other scholars of the time, the field was open for fresh interpretations with every new find – a situation that has not altogether ceased even now.

  During the rest of the nineteenth century more finds of fossil man and his works were made with increasing regularity as the study of remote prehistoric times was developed. Not all the finds were of the Neanderthal type; not all of them were even genuine discoveries of our forebears. A melancholy fraud was perpetrated on Boucher de Perthes by some of his workmen in 1863, when a completely modern sort of human jawbone (it was a completely modern human jawbone) was ‘found’ in the usual association with extinct faunal remains and flint tools near Abbeville in northern France. This time, the British who had supported Boucher in the past against his compatriot detractors were the first to smell a rat – French enthusiasts paradoxically stood by him for a long time after the fraud was exposed. In general, it is fair to say that those who consciously or unconsciously resist the idea of human evolution altogether will always favour a modern-looking fossil in an ancient context where they possibly can: if modern human beings can be shown to have existed ever further into the past, then one need not soon face up to the fact of human evolution at all. Those who firmly believe in the fact of human evolution might be expected, by the same token, to greet a little frostily any newly claimed representative of the modern sort of humanity to whom a very remote antiquity is attributed by his discoverers. We shall see that philosophical divergences along these lines have gone on throughout the history of anthropology, and do so to this day. Of course, responsible scholars readily disregard their own prejudices in the interest of scientific objectivity.

  A toothless jaw that was altogether a better match for the Neanderthal and Gibraltar skulls was found in Belgium in 1865, in a large cave called le Trou de la Naulette in the Namur province. It was not only toothless, it was chinless as well, and had evidently been so in life in a way not seen in modern specimens. There was also an ulna and a metacarpal bone from the fingerless part of the hand, along with the prerequisite bones of rhino, mammoth, reindeer and bear and stone tools to establish the antiquity of the whole collection, sealed under four strata of stalagmite. The tools were of a distinctive type later recognized as constituting the stone tool kit of the Neanderthal people. That missing chin was easily perceived as a simian trait, in line with the increasingly accepted conclusion since Darwin that man was ultimately descended from something like an ape. At the same time the jaw was clearly human and fitted well, for those who cared to remember them, with the Gibraltar and Neanderthal skulls. Schaafhausen welcomed its discovery. It is interesting to record that a little later in the century the apparent lack of certain bony attachments for the tongue on the la Naulette jaw was the occasion for some researchers to assert that Neanderthal Man could not speak: ‘la Naulette says No’. Related claims have gone on being made about other features of the Neanderthal voice-box in recent times, without succeeding in getting Neanderthal Man certified mute, as we shall see.

  It was at about this time in the 1860s that scientists working in the Alps established that a succession of glaciations had occurred there in what were, geologically speaking, comparatively recent times in the history of the world. No one knew what dates were to be put upon these glacial episodes, but it was evidently a matter of tens and hundreds of thousands of years. The implication was that the entire globe had suffered periods of glaciation, ice ages, whose geological remains – in the form of moraines and boulder-clays – could be tracked in northern and alpine regions. Later it was recognized that sea level fluctuations during periods of glaciation could similarly be identified in raised beaches and high river t
erraces. After the first discoveries of the advanced Stone Age tools and art objects of the Crô-Magnon people, with their modern-looking bones, started to be made in the 1860s, it was even possible for a first synthesis of discoveries to date to be constructed. The Frenchman Gabriel de Mortillet proposed a division of the Old Stone Age, dubbed the Palaeolithic period by the Englishman Lubbock, into a later Palaeolithic of glacial times incorporating the finer toolmaking traditions identified at such French sites as la Madaleine, Solutré, Aurignac and le Moustier and an earlier Palaeolithic of the cruder and heavier material of the sort that Boucher de Perthes had been finding in the river gravels of the raised terraces of the Somme. De Mortillet thought that Neanderthal types had made the earlier stuff and modern sorts of human being had made all the later tool traditions. In this he was wide of the mark, since it would quite soon emerge that while modern men had made the Magdalenian, Solutrian and Aurignacian tools, the Mousterian tool kits were distinctly associated with the Neanderthalers, while de Mortillet’s Chellean axe material had been produced by men earlier and more primitive than the Neanderthal people. Still, one admires the systematic thinking with which de Mortillet pioneered the correlation of tool types, geological phases and sorts of human being. Essentially, his entire approach is still with us.

  Germany was by now by-passing the legacy of Virchow and taking human evolution seriously. People like Schaafhausen and the radical Karl Vogt always had, but Virchow’s influence had usually seen to it that any finds suggestive of man’s presence in remote geological epochs were written off as intrusions of later, pathological material. Vogt colourfully remarked that: ‘Indeed remains of extinct animals intermixed with human bones had already turned up here and there; but these had either been pushed aside or entirely ignored, or explained in a manner that hardly cast a favourable light on the sagacity of the observer.’ But in 1868 the zoologist Ernst Haeckel boldly constructed a scheme of the descent of man from an ape ancestor through an intermediate and as yet undiscovered form to which he gave a classificatory name, for all the world as though he had its bones in front of him and sufficient others to compare them with so as to create a new genus and species. The name he gave to his hypothetical missing link between apes and men was Pithecanthropus alalus, meaning Ape-man without speech. According to the rigorous scientific rules of modern biology, he had no business creating a name for a genus not yet identified in the fossil record, nor for a species of that genus either, but his name is interesting historically. It posited a creature in which pongid (ape) traits were mingled with incipient hominid (human) ones, and such creatures have been subsequently found, though their form in detail might have surprised Haeckel; it also highlighted at an early stage in the story of anthropology the all-important issue of speech and language that has become crucial to modern discussion of anthropogenesis, the process of becoming human that overtook a line of ape-descended creatures over the past two million years. Two important points should be emphasized about anthropological studies in Haeckel’s time: no reputable biologist believed (or has ever believed) that human beings are descended from apes exactly like any of the apes still alive today; and no one thought that Neanderthal Man was an ape-man, for his human likeness was too apparent for all the divergences in detail of his bones. When people conjectured about a Pithecanthropus, they were thinking of much earlier days than those of Neanderthal Man.

  Moreover, 1868 was also the year in which the vivid Crô-Magnon discovery was made. In a rock shelter that is now behind the garage of the Crô-Magnon Hotel, in les Eyzies in the French Dordogne, railway workers found the remains of five or more individuals, including the bones of four men, a woman and a foetus not quite come to term. The workmen, labouring on the railway line from Paris that still brings stopping trains to les Eyzies, understandably managed to mix up the bones, but it was very clear that what had been found here were fully modern sorts of human beings, with skulls like our own and skeletons if anything more tall and imposing than the average inhabitants of Western Europe could boast in the second half of the nineteenth century. The bones were apparently associated with finely made flint tools and with pierced shells and ivory pendants that evidently constituted items of personal decoration and there were pieces of carved reindeer antler. To establish the considerable antiquity of the human remains there were the bones of extinct animals and geological indications of some long period of time since what appeared to be the deliberate disposal of the Crô-Magnon bodies. People who did not really care for Darwin and the idea of human evolution were pleased to see that, even in remote prehistoric times, human beings had been what they are today (or even better, like Adam and Eve before expulsion from the Garden of Eden); surely these Crô-Magnon types made better ancestors for the human race than some brutally visaged Neanderthaler ever could! On the other hand, the finds from Crô-Magnon puzzled superficial enthusiasts for evolution who expected to see some signs at least of primitiveness in the bones of the shell-wearing savages of very ancient Europe. It needed the sophistication of a scheme like de Mortillet’s to picture distinct phases within extreme antiquity when, first, more primitive human ancestors might have made the cruder axes and, later on, more modern types might be the authors of the finer products that were now coming to light.

  One of the skulls from the Crô-Magnon rock shelter.

  Those finer products were turning out to include not just delicate flint tools and necklaces, but real works of art not only found in geological contexts of antiquity with associated remains of extinct animals, but also themselves vividly depicting those extinct animals of a vanished ice age world. A world where the denizens of the cold north of today like the reindeer roamed southern Europe alongside species that have since disappeared altogether like mammoths and cave-bears. Stray finds of such ancient art objects in bone and ivory had been made, without acknowledgement, since the middle of the century; after the 1870s such finds were increasingly to be made and recognized, and spectacularly augmented by the discovery of large paintings and engravings in French and Spanish caves that most people could not at first believe to be the products of ice age humanity. The startling paintings of Altamira in northern Spain, first seen in 1879 and published in 1880, were widely condemned as a forgery despite the previous discovery of small pieces of art in the same tradition; people simply could not accept this quality and scale of art in an ice age context, even if its makers now seemed to have been fully modern types of humanity. The wall pictures of Pair-non-Pair in the Dordogne, discovered in 1881, were similarly disregarded till the end of the century. In the climate of opinion of the time, the first discoverer of the engravings at Marsoulas (Rhône Basin) concluded that they must be of recent origin. The revelation that the wonderful reindeer engraving of Kesslerloch on the Swiss–German border had prompted some of the locals to create more in what they imagined to be the same vein (based on drawings in children’s books) to keep the discoverer happy only served to bolster the scoffers. Even when the ice age art was recognized not to be of fraudulent origin, it was often put down to the Greeks or Romans.

  Meanwhile further remains of Neanderthal Man were being turned up. A skull and teeth unearthed at Taubach in Thuringia were dismissed by Virchow in his familiar style, while fragments of what we now know to be Neanderthal-related individuals were also found at Pontnewydd in Wales in 1874 and at Rivaux in southern France in 1876. In 1880, at Šipka in Moravia, a part of a Neanderthal child’s jawbone was found in association with the bones of extinct animals and stone tools of the type called after the French site of le Moustier, which de Mortillet had previously lumped in with the finer tools from other French sites as products not of the Neanderthal sort of humanity but of fully modern types. At Šipka there were also traces of the use of fire. Schaafhausen identified the Šipka child’s jaw as of Neanderthal kinship – he was by this time calling his Neanderthalers by the scientific name Homo primigenius, meaning Man of the first kind. If we do not call them by that not unappealing piece of scientific nomenclature
today, it is because William King of Galway had already coined neanderthalensis, with primacy in today’s system which tries to avoid the proliferation of new names for genera and species already named. Virchow, predictably, said the Šipka child was not a normal representative of another sort of humanity but again a pathological specimen.

  At Spy d’Orneau, again in the Namur province of Belgium, there came to light in 1886, in a cave on a limestone hillside above a small valley, two almost complete Neanderthal skeletons that afforded both a fuller picture than before of the Neanderthal anatomy and proof positive of the Neanderthalers’ association with the Mousterian culture. Just as Neanderthal Man was neither the primitive ape-man that people expected eventually to find low down on the ladder of human evolution nor the fully modern superman of Crô-Magnon, so it now appeared certain that his stone tools were neither the large and sometimes crude flaked axes of the ancient river gravels nor the finely retouched blades of the ice age artists. Neanderthal Man’s axes, when he made them, were smaller and slimmer than those from the Somme terraces, and he employed a distinctive set of what we now call side-scrapers and points (and other tools) made on flakes of stone, rarely as slender and systematically formed as the tools of the Crô-Magnons. Fossils and stone tools had been turning up at Spy since the beginning of the 1880s, but the careful excavations of 1895–6 were able to reach into deep and undisturbed deposits – so that the association of Neanderthal Man and the Mousterian tool kit was quite unambiguous. This association in itself made Virchow’s rearguard determination, to see in the increasing number of Neanderthal-type finds only an implausibly growing crop of pathological cases, look desperate and impossible. The work at Spy was done carefully and quickly published, and soon all the world had a much better idea of what the Neanderthalers had been like. The Spy skulls were very like the original skullcap from the Neanderthal, while the Spy jaws were very like the la Naulette jaw found in the same province of Belgium in 1865. The limb bones were robust like those from the Neanderthal cave and these, taken with what could be interpreted as the ape-like features of the skulls, permitted a picture to be presented of a creature not indeed at all close to the apes but a bit closer than any living human being, with a bent-legged ape-like walk. This was an early version of a caricature of Neanderthal posture that is regrettably still around today, having been perfected by a French anthropologist between the world wars.