by Paul Jordan
Before Neanderthal Man
The classic Neanderthalers of Western Europe mostly belong to the cold phase of the Last Glaciation that began about 75,000 years ago, though some of them like the le Moustier youth and perhaps the la Ferrassie burials may well belong to a late stage in the Neanderthal career and some of them certainly, as at Saint-Césaire, are very late indeed (after 40,000 BP) and contemporary with the appearance of modern types. Probably some of the classic Neanderthalers go back to the earlier phase of the Last Glaciation, after about 120,000 BP, and somewhat more generalized (i.e. less distinctively classic Neanderthal) types flourished in the preceding Last Interglacial, seen at sites in Central Europe, Italy and France. Against the hundreds of later Neanderthalers from the Last Glaciation (though some of them are represented only by fragments of bone and a few teeth), we have the remains of only some seventy earlier Neanderthal individuals in all and none of them is a remotely complete skeleton, which suggests that deliberate burial was only practised after the onset of the last ice age when death’s impact on the Neanderthal folk perhaps assumed weightier significance. The Last Interglacial roll-call of Neanderthalers includes finds from the Saccopastore and Abri Bourgeois-Delaunay sites in Italy and France respectively, and probably some of the Krapina people (the rest of whom belonging to the early and not so severely cold phase of the Last Glaciation). These earlier Neanderthal folk are not so very different from the later classics, as we saw, and plainly belong to the same evolutionary lineage even if they do not display quite the same degree of what we might call ‘total Neanderthalization’. The earlier individuals may be smaller-brained on average than their successors. The Saccopastore female skull looks very Neanderthal from the front – low vaulted and with a projecting face – but though the Neanderthal suprainiac fossa is present at the back, there is no sign of the typical Neanderthal bun; the male is very robust and harks back in some ways to much older types like the skull from Petralona in Greece, as we shall shortly see. The Krapina folk were slightly more lightly built than the classic Neanderthalers of the later ice age, as was the female (of possibly about the same age as the bulk of Krapina specimens) from Tabun in Israel – and she was small-brained for a Neanderthaler at about 1250 ml, though equipped with the usual heavy brow arches.
The Tabun Neanderthal woman’s skull.
The fragments from the Abri Bourgeois-Delaunay reach further back in time than Saccopastore and Krapina and demonstrate, where they afford enough evidence to identify their characteristics, that Neanderthal traits like, for example, the gap between the molars and the vertical part of the jawbone can be traced back through the Last Interglacial to the preceding glacial period. The site of Biache-Saint-Vaast in northern France confirms the presence of proto-Neanderthal people in Western Europe during that penultimate glaciation, with dates determined by the thermoluminescence method on burnt flints to lie between about 200,000 and 160,000 BP. Biache-Saint-Vaast shows an individual with the characteristically low oval skull shape seen from the rear of the Neanderthalers, with the equally characteristic bun at the back, but the cranial capacity is very low by later Neanderthal standards at only about 1200 ml. The dated burnt flakes of flint belonged at Biache-Saint-Vaast to a stone tool industry, without any axes, of the sort associated with pre-Mousterian toolmaking traditions.
The thick-boned skull fragments from Fontéchevade in the Charente are probably of about the same age in the last ice age but one, and are similarly deemed to hint at the development of Neanderthal traits. They were found in association with stone tools of the Tayacian culture which is clearly the European prototype of the Neanderthalers’ Mousterian. The Mousterian is one version of the Middle Palaeolithic sort of toolmaking that evolved out of the Lower Palaeolithic in Africa and Europe after about 250,000 BP. In Africa these Lower and Middle Palaeolithic phases are traditionally called the Early Stone Age (ESA) and Middle Stone Age (MSA) by archaeologists, but the same broad features characterize Lower Palaeolithic/Old Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age phases everywhere. Whereas the all-purpose hand-axe tool, arrived at by striking flakes off a core of stone, is the prominent type of the Lower Palaeolithic, the Middle Palaeolithic toolmakers put the emphasis on the use that could be made of the struck flakes, either raw as they came off the carefully prepared cores or retouched into points, scrapers and so on. The Levallois technique was an elegant way of achieving the sort of flake tool desired, by elaborate shaping of the core prior to striking off the flake, and some Mousterian assemblages from particular sites and periods make more of this technique than others. It was pioneered in East Africa perhaps as long ago as 250,000 BP and, whether or not intentionally to begin with, it produces rather readily haftable flakes to tip wooden spears. Where the Levallois technique was not employed by Middle Palaeolithic toolmakers, cores were more simply rotated during knapping to get off roughly consistent flakes without the highly controlled pre-shaping of the Levallois style, which required abundant supplies of good flint. Middle Palaeolithic (or MSA) toolmaking traditions do show variety through time and in different places, but they are basically the same all over their range in Africa, Europe and Western Asia. Not surprisingly, there were places where Lower Palaeolithic traditions lived on into Middle Palaeolithic times; indeed, the flake component can really be very similar between Lower and Middle Palaeolithic assemblages and contemporary manifestations might be assigned to one or the other on the grounds of the absence or presence of axes and the type of those axes – small heart-shaped axes, or none at all means Middle Palaeolithic while typically Acheulian axes mean Lower Palaeolithic. At this point, the formality of the distinction is obvious as a classification convenience, without chronological implications. It is appropriate to note, also, that not all Lower Palaeolithic assemblages included hand-axes in any case – we will be reviewing the worldwide technological progress of evolving humanity later on.
In Europe it was the Tayacian industrial tradition that led on to the Mousterian of the Neanderthal folk. The Tayacian, named after the locality in the Dordogne around which so many spectacular and important palaeolithic finds have been made since the middle of the last century, shows large numbers of small and often rather roughly shaped flakes, sometimes made with the Levallois technique. There are scrapers, denticulate pieces and points, sometimes even leaf-shaped bifacial points that look forward to much later phases of the Mousterian in Central Europe. There are axes of a Lower Palaeolithic sort, too, on occasions and chopper-like cores that hark back to earlier non-hand-axe industries: the Tayacian may be derived from either the Acheulian hand-axe tradition or a Lower Palaeolithic axeless tradition with flakes, or both. Tayacian tools, or something to all intents and purposes the same, are found widely in European sites of the penultimate glacial period. Taubach and Weimar in Germany have Tayacian type tools with points and side-scrapers, and even Tabun in Israel, in its lower levels, shows something essentially Tayacian to antedate the Mousterian of the Levant (after an intervening episode with Acheulian axes). At the Grotte de Rigabe in Provence, a Tayacian with many scrapers and Levallois flakes looks like a good precursor of the Mousterian back in the times of the penultimate glaciation.
Pre-Mousterian flake tools, Tayacian above, Clactonian below.
The Tayacian itself has possible antecedents at earlier dates beyond the penultimate glacial period. From Bilzingsleben in North Germany comes an industry with flakes not unlike the Tayacian and diminutive chopper-like cores. Bilzingsleben belongs to another interglacial period that came before the penultimate glaciation, lasting from about 420,000 to 300,000 BP, with a sharp but short (only 12,000 years) glacial episode within it. To that same interglacial or the end of the preceding glacial phase dates the chopper-core and flake material from Clacton in Essex in association with which was found the oldest pointed wooden spear fragment yet discovered anywhere in the world, perhaps as much as 450,000 years old. Doubts sometimes cast on the Clacton spear as being really a digging stick or snow probe (both would be s
ophisticated enough to impress us) are rather dissipated by the recent discovery in Germany of three spears of spruce (the longest 2.3 m in length) long enough to qualify as throwing rather than thrusting spears and dated to some 400,000 BP. These spears, from Schöningen about 90 km west of Berlin, were even accompanied by grooved fir branches that look like holders for sophisticated composite tools – not otherwise evidenced at such an early date and not thought to constitute a part of the Mousterian tool kit, let alone anything earlier. The Schöningen site yielded up many flint flakes including points and scrapers and animal bones, mainly of horses, bearing marks of butchery. In the light of all this evidence, quibbles about the hunting abilities of the Neanderthalers of more than 300,000 years later seem misplaced. At the same time, the very slow progress of all technological innovation, if that word is at all appropriate, in the pre-Upper Palaeolithic world is well brought home to us.
Human remains to go with the finds of stone tools from before the last ice age but one are few and far between in Europe, as in the rest of the world. Ehringsdorf in Germany yielded the very partial remains of four individuals including a child, with excellent preservation in the limestone deposits of a warm spring of both faunal and floral evidence. Dating by two methods based on radioactivity produced an age estimate of around 225,000 years, but the faunal remains suggest a perhaps later date, within the Last Interglacial after 130,000 BP. The human remains resemble those of the generalized Neanderthalers (the adult mandible, however, also resembles the jaw from Mauer, near Heidelberg, which is much older than any Neanderthalers) and the tools look like the run of pre-Mousterian flake products, so the later date still recommends itself to some workers. But Ehringsdorf could belong to a warmer interstadial within the penultimate glaciation, in which case the human remains represent a pre-Neanderthal type and the tools a pre-Mousterian like the Tayacian and so forth. The jaw from Montmaurin near Toulouse, dated by physical means to between 130,000 and 190,000 years ago, also displays a mixture of Neanderthal and older features: in particular there are indications of the retromolar gap of the Neanderthalers and their taurodont tooth pattern, while the massive build of the jaw harks back to older jaws like that from Mauer. The very fragmentary remains from Pontnewydd in Wales also display the taurodont teeth tendency, typically seen later in the Neanderthalers, at about 225,000 BP. The stone tools of Pontnewydd are very rough-and-ready hand-axes, probably owing their crudity to the poverty of the available raw material. The very oldest tools that can be seen to belong to the Mousterian or pre-Mousterian tradition date from just a little earlier than this time: at an age of about 238,000 BP at the Cotte de St Brelade on Jersey, at about 250,000 BP in the Grotte Vaufrey in France, and at the same date at Mesvin in Belgium. Before this sort of date, no distinctively pre-Mousterian foreshadowings can be positively identified and what flake tools are found constitute the flake component of the Acheulian hand-axe tradition or belong to the early non-hand-axe manifestations of the Lower Palaeolithic. But if the beginnings of the Neanderthalers’ Mousterian tool tradition cannot be traced back earlier than about 250,000 BP, some of the physical traits of the Neanderthal people can be glimpsed at and beyond this date – Neanderthalers as such are not found in these early times but some of their physical characteristics were evidently in process of evolution. From Steinheim in Germany comes a skull, dated to about 250,000 BP, with several Neanderthal traits on view alongside others that the Neanderthalers did not display. The taurodont tooth formation is present, as is the suprainiac fossa at the back of the skull, where a distinctly Neanderthal look obtains. But the face, though brow-arched, is flatter than Neanderthal faces and shows the canine fossa at the cheeks that Neanderthalers lacked. The skull suffered some post-mortem distortion, but it seems clear that its sides were flatter and more vertical in the tin-loaf form of modern Homo sapiens, although cranial capacity was low at about 1100 ml even for a modern woman let alone a Neanderthal female. Skull fragments from Swanscombe in England show the suprainiac fossa of the later Neanderthalers, too, though the area of the likely brow arches is missing. The Swanscombe fragments are noticeably thick in section like rather earlier human skulls, but the cranial capacity has been estimated at the quite high figure of 1325 ml. The associated faunal remains and Acheulian axes suggest a date between 400,000 and 250,000 BP for the Swanscombe skull, putting it potentially in thew same age range (maybe a little older) as the Steinheim skull, with which it is quite well matched in character. (The faunas of the two sites are similar, too, and they both probably belong to the long interglacial period before the penultimate ice age.) The fine Acheulian hand-axes of solidly Lower Palaeolithic character found with the Swanscombe skull, with its very incipient Neanderthal features, point to the likelihood that the Neanderthalers’ Mousterian tool kit itself evolved, at least in part, from the hand-axe tradition.
One of the Ehringsdorf skulls.
The Steinheim skull.
The back of the assembled Swanscombe fragments.
Deep in a cave complex in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain, a cache of bones of many individuals was recently discovered and is still under study. Dating indications suggest that this material belongs to a period before 200,000 BP, and perhaps as far back as 300,000 years ago. There are over a thousand bones and teeth from at least thirty individuals: men, women and children. It may emerge that whole skeletons are included among the remains since even the little bones of fingertips have been found and one of those hyoid bones that have a bearing on speech capacity. Whether the Sima de los Huesos (‘pit of bones’) was the scene of human disposal of the dead or the dumping ground of predatory and scavenging animals is not clear. Again, some signs of incipient ‘Neanderthalization’ are to be seen on these remains. The cranial bones are thick and of the two main skull finds noted to date one is of small capacity at about 1125 ml but the other is certainly large for its date at an estimated 1390 ml of cranial capacity. The double-arched brow-ridge formation of the Neanderthalers is evidenced in these skulls, as is the projection of the mid face. In one of the chinless mandibles, which in their massive build resemble those of earlier forms of humanity, there is a suggestion of the Neanderthalers’ retromolar gap (which goes with the forward projection of the mid facial area). One of the skulls exhibits the typically Neanderthal lack of a canine fossa, which partly accounts for the inflated cheek appearance of the Neanderthal folk – though another does possess the canine fossa. Preliminary assemblings of skeletal material indicate that the Atapuerca people were shorter than their ancestors (in the shape of Homo erectus, who achieved an impressive stature in Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier) and were on their way to the development of Neanderthal traits of arm and leg proportions and even finger shape. Of the many teeth from the site (which are smaller than erectus teeth) some incisors show signs of scratching with stone tools, in the way that some Neanderthal teeth also do; the practice of cutting off meat held in the front teeth is strongly suggested here and the directionality of the scratch marks indicates that the Atapuerca people were right-handed. All in all, the Atapuerca remains constitute a variable population already displaying the early development of certain Neanderthal traits, at a period probably between 250,000 and 200,000 BP. It is interesting to note that no tools were found in association with these human remains but among the animal bones of the site there were found the remains of an ancestral form of the cave-bear, with which beast Neanderthal Man was to have his enigmatic dealings later on.
