Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  The skull from Petralona in Greece is hard to date precisely. It is certainly older than 200,000 BP, to go by physical dates on material found over it, and younger than 730,000 BP, on the grounds of the magnetic polarity of rock beneath it. Something in the range 500,000 to 300,000 BP is indicated. The Petralona brain-case is more expanded than those of erectus and comes in at about 1220 ml, though its shape at the back resembles erectus skulls. It lacks the mid-face projection of the Neanderthalers (its face is bigger altogether) but it shows their double brow arch configuration, broad nasal opening and inflated cheeks. It rather resembles the Broken Hill skull from Kabwe in East Africa (also called Rhodesian Man) and we may broadly conclude that both Petralona and Broken Hill represent a similar stage of human evolution after Homo erectus, with Petralona in Europe on its way to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Broken Hill in Africa perhaps on its way to Homo sapiens sapiens. We shall be looking at Broken Hill again later on and must also, in the meantime, recall that some scholars believe that Neanderthal Man too has contributed to the final evolution of modern Homo sapiens. No tools were found with the Petralona skull or close faunal association, but if it belongs with the sort of faunal remains found elsewhere in the cave, it might just be as old as 500,000 BP.

  The skull from Petralona.

  To about 400,000 BP dates the fossil human material from the Caune de l’Arago at Tautavel in the Pyrenees. A similar situation prevails here as with the finds discussed above: an incipience of Neanderthal traits against a background of erectus-like characteristics. The site has yielded fragments of some sixty individuals, including hip bones, two jaws and the front, right side and face of a skull. The hip is robustly made, like the same bones of an erectus skeleton; the larger jaw is erectus-like, the smaller one is more like a Neanderthaler’s; the skull is brow-ridged and without a canine fossa, and rather Neanderthal in general shape, though more straight-sided than real Neanderthalers’ are and showing no mid-face prognathism. At about 1160 ml, the Arago skull was bigger-brained than erectus, though well short of Neanderthal capacity, with less of the constricted look behind the eye sockets than erectus skulls show. The Swanscombe fragments could fit fairly well into the Arago skull. Tools found in association with the human remains were mostly flakes, with a few hand-axes. Large stones among the tools have been interpreted as pointing to some sort of built structure in the cave, perhaps a wood and hide shelter anchored by the stones. The cave deposits are mostly of a cold climate character, indicating that at Arago we have pushed back dim Neanderthal and Mousterian foreshadowings into a period three ice ages ago. The massive shin-bone from Boxgrove, near Chichester in England, probably belongs to an interstadial of that same ice age, along with the fine ovate hand-axes found in association with it, as do the retouched scrapers and flakes found without any accompanying hand-axes at High Lodge in East Anglia and the irregular flakes and chopping tools found at Swanscombe (below the level of the skull) and Clacton in England. The absence of hand-axes at High Lodge and presence of refined ones at Boxgrove, which look too good for their early date, only goes to show that no hard and fast characterization of the Lower Palaeolithic (or Middle or Upper for that matter) should be made: availability of raw material, functional requirements and a degree of some sort of cultural variety were apparently in force.

  The skull from the Caune de l’Arago, Tautavel.

  No tools at all were found in association with the jaw from a gravel pit at Grafenrein, near Mauer, not far from Heidelberg in Germany. The jaw today goes by both the names of Mauer and Heidelberg and, by virtue of primacy of scientific naming, Homo heidelbergensis is the name that many scholars give to the whole stage of human evolution that comes between Homo erectus and the various representatives of early Homo sapiens (whether on the way to fully modern or Neanderthal forms) that have been found in Europe, Africa and Asia. But others are content to call Mauer itself (and its contemporaries in Africa) and what came after them by the name of ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens. (It is worth noting that there can be nothing hard and fast about any of these classifications, either, in view of the paucity, fragmentariness and evident variability of the specimens to hand.) The Mauer jaw is a massive fossil, with a very receding chin area (where there is no chin in our terms) and very broad rami ascending to the points where the jaw articulated with the skull: a sign of heavy musculature for hard chewing. For such a massive jaw, the teeth are rather small, and Neanderthal-like in their taurodontism, though no other Neanderthal features could be said to be present. The date of the Mauer jaw is not known for certain, but it appears to belong to an interglacial period predating the ice age time of the Arago find – in other words, to three interglacials ago. Something like 500,000 BP is indicated. With the Mauer jaw, we have followed back in time, as far as we can, even the faintest hints of the Neanderthal type; as much as 350,000 years may separate Mauer from the earliest true Neanderthalers. The researchers who have recently identified some of the Neanderthal mtDNA profile reckon that something like that length of time is required to explain the divergence of this part of the Neanderthal genetic make-up from our own. On this interpretation, Mauer at 500,000 BP would represent the last sort of common human ancestor between ourselves and the Neanderthalers. Homo heidelbergensis would have started on the way to Homo sapiens sapiens via the non-Neanderthal sorts of early Homo sapiens seen outside Europe. For it is a fact that the distinctively Neanderthal turn of human evolution seen in Europe, Western Asia and the Levant has no antecedents outside Europe; in Africa and Asia (east and west) there are no foreshadowings of the Neanderthal package of physical traits. The Neanderthalers evidently evolved in Europe; their presence in Western Asia and their appearances in the Levant are the results of spread and movement rather than in situ evolution. People of broadly the same stage of human evolution as the Neanderthalers did evolve in Africa and Asia, but none of them could be called Neanderthal as such. Whether the Neanderthalers could breed with their non-Neanderthal contemporaries is a matter of controversy (though the mtDNA evidence as far as it goes suggests they did not), as is the question of their capacity to evolve into fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens (where, again, the genetic evidence suggests they could not).

  The Mauer jaw.

  Homo heidelbergensis belongs to that previous broad stage of human evolution from which both Neanderthalers and fully moderns emerged, with or without interbreeding. Back beyond Mauer, we shall find no distinctly Neanderthal traits, however faintly expressed. Beyond Mauer stretches back the era of Homo erectus or, if one thinks that this name should be reserved for the typical specimens mostly discovered in the Far East, then of Homo ergaster – a separate species that some researchers think evolved in Africa, and spread to Europe after Homo erectus as such had developed in the Far East. Beyond the time of the Mauer jaw, no faint prototype of the Mousterian culture can be traced among the Lower Palaeolithic tools that are found in considerable quantities in Western Europe, often along the old courses of rivers where flint was exposed in the banks for the making of tools and the waterways offered routes through the interglacial woods and drinking places for men and beasts. The Lower Palaeolithic period was dominated by the presence of hand-axes, though there were times and circumstances when flakes without axes were made and used – perhaps for shortage of good raw material, or for some limited function, or even as a result of incursions into Europe of different people from the Far East, where the hand-axe never caught on as a cultural product. Hand-axes also gradually diminished in importance through time as the Lower Palaeolithic gave way to the Middle Palaeolithic of traditions like the Mousterian, as though more flake varieties with possibilities for hafting in wooden spears or handles reduced the attraction of the weighty all-purpose hand-axe tool. For all that, it was the hand-axe in its various forms that characterized the Lower Palaeolithic era in Africa and Europe, after its development in Africa more than 1.3 mya. Hand-axe toolmaking traditions are called after the name of the French site at St Acheul where these tools were found
in abundance in the nineteenth century: Acheulian.

  A fine Acheulian hand-axe.

  The Acheulian flourished in Europe into the period of the penultimate glaciation, by which time intimations of the Mousterian were well in evidence: it had first appeared in Europe some time after about 700,000 BP. There were thus some half a million years of the European Acheulian during which hand-axes of various forms (but with little evidence of progressive change) were made in the hands of Homo erectus (or egaster) physical types and their descendants like Homo heidelbergensis or early Homo sapiens. The fossilized bones of human types predating Homo heidelbergensis in Europe are few and far between. We may assume that the makers of the early hand-axes of Torralba in Spain, of the Somme gravels at Abbeville in France and of Kent’s Cavern in Devon were broadly of the Homo heidelbergensis type. In Africa the Acheulian developed out of a more primitive tradition, named Oldowan after Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, which centred upon knapped pebbles that archaeologists call chopper-cores and chopping tools. That development from Oldowan to Acheulian took place in Africa at the early date of about 1.4 mya but it seems that the Acheulian with its axes did not reach Europe until about 700,000 BP. Before that, Europe was going on with a sort of latter-day Oldowan of choppers and associated flakes, itself of ultimately African origin. Such an industry has been discovered at Isernia near Rome, dating to at least 730,000 BP, to go by the magnetic polarity of the volcanic rock that overlies the level of the tools. The sort of human beings who made these tools probably belonged to a transitional form between Homo erectus (ergaster) and Homo heidelbergensis; at Gran Dolina in Spain some teeth, jaw and skull pieces and hand and foot bones from four individuals represent this type of fossil man, in a fragmentary form, at about 780,000 BP. (Some of the fragments carry cut marks similar to others on animal bones from the site and unlike the marks made by carnivore teeth, which raises again at this early date the possibility of cannibalism of some sort.) The German site of Kärlich has yielded choppers and flakes that may go back to about 900,000 BP, and a similar situation is evidenced at le Vallonet and Soleihac in France, the latter site showing among its choppers and scraper flakes a single prototypical hand-axe. Chopper and flake assemblages are in fact quite widespread in Europe, if not always of certain early date. It looks as though all these early pebble tool assemblages represent a first wave of human spread out of Africa; in Africa the late Oldowan culture with its development towards Acheulian with axes was associated with early Homo erectus (ergaster) and we can reasonably assume that it was the same sort of early human beings who brought the Oldowan and then the Acheulian to Europe. The Acheulian (firmly associated with erectus/ergaster in Africa) could have come across the Mediterranean (with low sea levels and much extra dry ground during glacial periods) via Gibraltar and Sicily and Italy, but the earlier Oldowan probably came through the Levantine region. The site of ’Ubeidiya in Israel already shows a sort of crude Acheulian axe development against a background of chopper tools at between 1.4 and 1.2 mya. A few very fragmentary human remains accompany these finds. It is worth noting that the Jordan Valley is in fact an extension north of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and enjoyed, at the time in question, a similar ecology to that heartland of human evolution which includes the important area of Olduvai Gorge. At Dmanisi in Georgia an erectus/ergaster jaw, associated with animal bones and pebble tools, has been dated by three physical methods to 1.8 mya.

  At about 1 mya we have taken the human story in Europe back as far as it goes, far beyond any evidence of physical types that could usefully be called incipiently Neanderthal or of tool types that could be called proto-Mousterian. All of that lay in the distant future when Europe was first occupied by man. At this point, we have linked the career of Neanderthal Man back into the big story of human evolution out of Africa – the story in which we all, Homo sapiens sapiens, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, archaic Homo sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo habilis before them, play our parts. In the next chapter we will review the long evolution of mankind from the ground up, as it were – from the ancestry we share with the apes. Before that, the general pattern of life of the pre-Neanderthal people we have discussed in this chapter needs to be explored.

  Fire was certainly wielded by them in at least the later phases of our pre-Neanderthal period and it is very doubtful whether Europe could have been infiltrated at all in the basically cold times that came on after about 800,000 BP without fire, which gives warmth and light and defence against animal enemies as well as offering the possibility of cooked food. But cooking was perhaps a low priority for a long time and fires do not seem to have been often built in any very structured way with proper hearths. Evidence for the use of fire at about 200,000 BP has been found at the Hungarian site of Verteszöllös, at a somewhat earlier date at Bilzingsleben in Germany, and at up to 400,000 BP at Menez-Dragan on the south coast of Brittany and at Terra Amata, near Nice, where a hearth-like floor (with burnt mussel shells) has been identified among stones that possibly anchored some sort of shelter of poles and skins. From such remote times, as far back as about 1 mya, it is not likely that all occupied caves have survived as caves but were lost to erosion and collapse in some cases, though it seems clear that in coldish Europe caves would have been occupation sites of choice. If the evidence of Terra Amata and a few other sites like Ariendorf in Germany and Latamne in Syria is correctly interpreted as signs of structure, then people were already building additional shelter for themselves. But it has to be said that most sites, including ones with good preservation of evidence, show no real organizational patterns at all – no regular hearths, no storage pits, no intentional arrangements of stones. There are just scatters of ash and the debris of flint knapping and butchery. These people were living, of course, like their Neanderthal and Crô-Magnon successors, as foragers, gathering plants and scavenging or hunting animal food. We have seen that finds of wooden spears do go some way to vindicating the hunting prowess of these pre-Neanderthal people and the decline of hand-axes throughout this period in favour of flake tools that could be hafted and mounted on wood probably charts the slow improvement of hunting techniques and technology in general. Microwear traces on hand-axes from Hoxne in Suffolk suggest that on occasion at least these all-purpose tools were used to cut meat (as well as work hides, bone and wood, and chop up vegetable matter). In addition to wooden spears and perhaps holders for flake tools, small wooden containers might well have been in use and even, just conceivably, wooden rafts of some kind; low sea levels may have facilitated Mediterranean crossings of Acheulian folk into Europe from North Africa, but Gibraltar might have been reached by boat – there is one Indonesian island colonized by Homo erectus that geologists believe was never connected to any mainland and so European erectus/ergaster people too may have been able to boat or raft over short sea crossings.

  We have seen that hints of cannibalism, which always carry the possibility of some sort of ritual behaviour, have been discerned at Gran Dolina as early as about 780,000 BP; the Tautavel skull of a pre-Neanderthaler of about 350,000 BP was smashed at the back in a suggestive manner, too. But indications of any ideologically motivated cannibalism have to be said to be vanishingly sparse, as do signs of any artistic endeavour on the part of the Acheulian and proto-Mousterian people. You might say that the symmetry of the hand-axes, which are sometimes painstakingly refined in execution, points to a developing aesthetic sense but any further manifestations of such feeling are few and far between. Several of the French sites have yielded up bone pieces of Acheulian times with straight lines, arcs and parallels that do not look like the results of cutting into joints for meat or using bones as cutting boards. The site of Becov in the Czech Republic offers a red striated piece of stone which may have been collected about 250,000 years ago for its visual appeal. Hand-axe makers seem sometimes to have worked around fossils encountered in flint in the course of knapping, as though these features had somehow taken their fancy. The Terra Amata site
produced seventy-five bits of natural pigment, not evidently of local origin, in yellow, brown, red and purple, abraded by use – to colour hides or people’s skins? African Acheulian sites, and others outside Europe, have produced similar evidence. From an Acheulian site at Bhimbetka in India there has come a stone bearing a meandering line of peck markings with a shallow cupule depression, and from Berekhat Ram in Israel a 4 cm high fragment of tuff whose naturally human shape (faintly human, at least) has apparently been improved artificially around the ‘neck’ and along the ‘arms’. Finds like these are too meagre to form the basis for any speculation about the state of mind of their makers, indeed too utterly uncommon to build anything on at all. The unstructured nature of the dwelling sites of these people without anything to suggest any possible divisions of labour or specialized activities, the extraordinarily slow pace and limitedness of technological change over hundreds of thousands of years, the absence as far as we can tell of graves, the lack to all intents and purposes of any ritual or artistic tendencies, all these things paint a picture of a long-persisting way of life even more culturally restricted than that of the Neanderthalers of the last ice age. If we may doubt the humanity (in our terms) of the Neanderthalers’ sexual and social relations, then we must be even more doubtful about the same sides of life as far as the pre-Neanderthalers are concerned. Anything like monogamous mating and kinship relations seems very unlikely indeed. The minds that piloted these people through their short and exigent lifetimes must have been significantly less adept than those of the Neanderthalers, as the much smaller cranial capacities of the skulls that have come to light would anyway imply. Whether they wielded speech and language we cannot tell, though the development of areas of their brains associated in us with speech would seem to allow the possibility that they could speak up to a point, but even if they did it must have been speech of a very limited kind, restricted to a narrow range of mental expression that was probably more to do with social relations within the group than anything else. The reasons for this speculation will be discussed in the following chapters, as we chart the evolution of humanity out of our remote ape ancestry.