Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  But some anthropologists continue to maintain that long-term local continuities of physical traits, seen particularly in fossil skulls, support the hypothesis of ‘multiregional evolution’ by constant gene flow across group boundaries without population replacements by massive emigration and extermination or outcompeting. They might admit that a worldwide web of exogamous mating habits, never seriously impeded by mountain or desert or any other sort of barrier, can look like a tall order; but it looks to them like an even taller order to be invited to conclude that certain physical characteristics seen in erectus populations in some particular part of the world could be accidentally reinvented by evolution in an entirely unrelated sapiens population in the same place at a later date. They point to certain traits seen in the erectus remains from Zhoukoudian in China that prefigure modern Mongoloid racial characteristics: the relatively small faces with flattened cheeks (notched by the anatomical feature called ‘incisura malaris’) and unprominent noses, together with a shovel-like shape to the backs of the front teeth. A bridge between erectus at Zhoukoudian and modern orientals is provided by the skulls, dating from times after 300,000 BP, from Yunxian, Mapa, Dali and Jinniu Shan in China, all late erectus/early sapiens in which some of the same traits persist: a similar skull, in a damaged state, was found in India. (But opponents of the multiregional hypothesis draw attention to the occurrence of incisura malaris and face-shortening in the African Broken Hill skull and to the shovelled incisors of an African specimen of Homo erectus.) Australasia may be even more supportive of the multiregional idea than China, for there the erectus line evidently continued until a late date, and traits that look forward to some of those of the Australian aborigines have been detected in an erectus skull from Sangiran on Java at about 700,000 BP, with a further link in the chain of descent at the Javanese site of Ngandong at perhaps as late as 100,000 BP. The skulls from Ngandong, on the Solo River, were once dubbed Neanderthal or at least Neanderthaloid and they do, indeed, resemble contemporary Neanderthal skulls (as some African ones that we have reviewed do too) in their general characteristics as belonging to a broadly similar stage of early Homo sapiens evolution, but they lack the really distinctive traits of the true Eurasian Neanderthalers and their cranial capacity is rather closer to erectus than neanderthalensis. (The Ngandong skulls have, incidentally, been credited with affording evidence – in their smashed skull bases and faces – of head-hunting and trophy-mounting at a date of something over 100,000 BP.)

  Some 60,000 years ago Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were all joined together by the low sea levels of the glacial era in the island continent of Sahul, which could be reached from Java by a run of small islands and a final sea crossing of some 80 km that early people could only negotiate on some sort of raft. (To arrive at Sahul from anywhere else would have required a rather longer crossing.) Fossils dug up in Australia fall into two types, a robustly built group that seems to some anthropologists to take on the Java erectus line with big brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, thick skull walls and large teeth, and a more gracile set with much more slenderly made faces. Interestingly, it is the graciles who seem to represent the earlier of the two groups (the best dated being from Lake Mungo at about 30,000 BP, which carries the further distinction of being the world’s oldest certain cremation) while the robusts of Kow Swamp appear to date as late as 10,000 BP. Multiregionalists think two waves of population reached Sahul after 60,000 BP, one of them of distinctly Javanese erectus lineage and the other perhaps of ultimately Chinese erectus stock via the Philippines. On this view, the modern aborigines of Australia are a mixture of both lines, fully Homo sapiens sapiens on account of constant gene flow with the wide world of humanity, but retaining certain physical traits long characteristic of their general part of the world. It is indeed a tall order to think that the big prognathous faces and marked brow-ridge development of some Australian aboriginal fossils (and, to an extent, of some living Australians, too) might represent a re-evolution, as it were, of traits formerly seen in the region but later entirely eclipsed by incoming ex-African emigrants who had evolved into fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens without these same traits some tens of thousands of years before. As we shall see in the next chapter, a case can be made for the continuity in parts of Europe of Neanderthaler traits in a similar way to that proposed above for local erectus traits in Australasia.

  The proponents of the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis might concede that the regional continuity of some traits from erectus into sapiens, and even sapiens sapiens, could just possibly point to some limited interbreeding between their conquering heroines and heroes and native people already living in their Lebensraum, but they believe that fossils like those from Klasies River Mouth taken together with the mtDNA evidence and in particular the findings of research into patterns of nuclear DNA can only mean that the descendants of a small population of virtually fully modern types spread out from Africa at some time around 100,000 BP, to populate the world with their own kind, to the extinction of the representatives of any other lines of descent that had come down from Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis in the other parts of the world into which the Africans were reaching. The limited genetic variety of Homo sapiens sapiens all over the world today (when compared with our close primate relatives) has been interpreted as near proof of this scenario, with the strong implication of a crisis in human affairs through which only a small number of our direct ancestors survived to pass on their genetic make-up to all of us. To complete the picture, it has recently been suggested that worldwide populations of all sorts of humanity were seriously depleted by extremely adverse conditions brought on by an unparalleled volcanic explosion on Sumatra at about 80,000 BP that gave the emigrating moderns their chance to overrun areas previously held by other human types. But evidence for such a decline in human populations is not available in the fossil and archaeological records.

  It may seem for the moment a reasonable compromise to admit that modern global humanity’s genetic make-up probably carries a preponderance of African inheritance but that this need not all have been exported by pugnacious colonists nor need the genetic contributions of other stocks in other parts of the world have been entirely obliterated on the march to worldwide Homo sapiens sapiens.

  Neanderthal Nemesis

  The first clear epiphany of a modern form of humanity, if we set aside for the moment the people of Klasies River Mouth and their perhaps faintly unreliable African compatriots from Border Cave and so on, is manifest in the caves of northern Israel. We saw in Chapter 3 that pre-war excavations at Mount Carmel turned up a collection of human remains that seemed to cover a range from the very Neanderthal at Tabun to the more or less modern (if rugged) at Skhul; anthropologists wondered for a long time whether they were faced with a single, very variable population on its evolutionary way to modernity, or with a sequence of evolution from older Neanderthalers to later moderns, or with the results of interbreeding between originally separate modern and Neanderthal communities. New evidence, new interpretations and in particular new datings from the 1960s on were to create a shifting appreciation of the Mount Carmel evidence that is not entirely cleared up to this day.

  Model of the bones of Skhul V as found by excavation.

  The Tabun Neanderthal woman’s skull.

  The stratigraphy of the Mount Carmel sites is particularly difficult to judge, being nothing like the relatively level and well-separated layering of, say, the French caves, but rather distorted and convoluted by the presence of ‘swallow holes’ that may have led to mixtures of materials from different periods and certainly makes for uncertainties about precise relationships of human fossil finds in different levels and at different sites with their various associations of tools and animal bones. Consequently, dating interpretations of the finds have had a chequered history. To the original finds from the Mount Carmel caves called et-Tabun and es-Skhul there have been added since the Second World War further finds in northern Israel from Qafzeh, Amud and Kebara, with a
clear division between Neanderthal types at Tabun, Amud and Kebara and more or less modern types at Skhul and Qafzeh. All of them, of whichever type, have been found in association with much the same sort of Mousterian tool kit, once thought the technological preserve of the Neanderthalers alone. For a while it was possible to see in the tools a progression from thicker to thinner and flatter flakes that seemed to make (by association) Tabun older than Kebara, and Skhul youngest of all (the sequence of large faunal remains was deemed to back up this picture); a neat advance could be perceived from Neanderthalers with improving tool types to more modern people with most progressed tools. But subsequently it began to look, on the evidence of microfaunal remains (mostly rodent bones), as if the more modern types from Qafzeh predated most of the Neanderthalers in northern Israel. Thermoluminescence dating backed up this interpretation by putting the Kebara Neanderthalers at about 60,000 BP and the Qafzeh moderns at 90,000 BP. Any reservations about the Qafzeh TL dates were largely dispelled by the addition of Electron Spin Resonance dating of tooth enamel (from associated faunal remains) at Qafzeh to 115,000–100,000 BP. The Skhul moderns came out at 100,000–80,000 BP by the same ESR dating method. Taken with the microfaunal evidence, these TL and ESR dates – providing all associations are correctly judged – are powerfully suggestive that uniquely in these sites more or less modern forms of humanity have been found substantially predating the appearance of Neanderthalers at the same sites. The Tabun Neanderthal woman’s skull would appear to belong by ESR on seemingly associated animal teeth to about 110,000 BP, roughly the same time as the Skhul and Qafzeh moderns, to complicate the picture further, but it remains a possibility that the Tabun woman’s skull, found before the Second World War, represents an intrusion into early levels of the site from a later period, perhaps the same time as the rest of the Neanderthalers of the region.

  A modern-looking child’s skull from Qafzeh.

  These Levantine Neanderthal folk are not quite typical of the Neanderthal population as known in Western Europe. The Tabun woman, for example, though brow-ridged in a thoroughly Neanderthal fashion, shows an otherwise rather gracile skull, with the low cranial capacity for a Neanderthaler of about 1250 ml. The Amud Neanderthal male, on the other hand, is the proud possessor of the largest fossil human brain known at some 1700 ml and of the tallest Neanderthal physique at 1.78 m. Additionally, he shows relatively slender brow-ridges, and cheeks less inflated than those of classic Neanderthalers, with something approaching a chin, and a mastoid process closer to the modern size than most of his kind; his skull shape lacks the typical Neanderthal bun at the back but the Neanderthal occipital torus is on display and, seen from the rear, the skull has that rounded rather than loaf-shaped appearance that is invariably seen among the Neanderthalers, while it has Neanderthal length, taken to rather an extreme, when seen from the side. ESR dating on a mammal tooth from the same level suggests some time as late as 50,000–40,000 BP for the adult male Neanderthaler of Amud and, unless with his remains we have stumbled on a very aberrant Neanderthaler, it is tempting to see in them certain indications of evolution towards the more modern form of humanity, either by membership of a population of Neanderthal origin that had taken in a genetic input from moderns (for whom we have not to look far at Skhul and Qafzeh, though some tens of thousands of years earlier on those sites) or by a more general participation in a time of rapid but variable human evolution when a patchwork of traits looking both backwards and forwards could be shared around various populations, manifesting themselves here and there from time to time, while the wider picture tended always to the replacement of the older with the newer characteristics. (The Shanidar Neanderthalers show something of the same non-typical array of features as the late Neanderthal male of Amud.)

  The Neanderthal male of Amud.

  The infant Neanderthaler from Amud, with markedly more in the way of Neanderthal character in, for example, the absence of a chin, came from an earlier level of the site and is estimated to date to some 60,000–50,000 years ago. The Kebara Neanderthaler, whose hyoid bone and pelvis have proved so useful in settling some questions about Neanderthal speech capacity and birthing, is of about the same age and interestingly, being more or less complete below the neck (or, rather, below the massive, chinless jaw!) shows body proportions of the markedly cold-adapted sort seen in the European Neanderthalers, bolstering the thought that the Neanderthal people of the Levant were not long-term indigenes of the region but had been pushed out of their northerly homelands by the extreme cold of the second phase of the last ice age, which even they could not support. This Kebara male was found, we recall, to have been buried in a deliberately dug grave and the site provided the remains of a hearth fire with carbonized wild peas.

  In contrast to the Neanderthalers of Israel, the more or less moderns of the same area present a general physique that looks decidedly warm in adaptation, tall and lanky limbed in a way that fairly suggests genetic antecedence in the south, in Africa. They are not entirely modern-looking in terms of any peoples living in the world today, but even where they show rugged features these are not of a Neanderthal character; for example, the strong brow-ridges of Skhul 5 and Qafzeh 6 are not in the least like Neanderthalers’ and their foreheads rise high above them. The whole form of these people is unmistakably modern, particularly in their skulls. Plainly, we are dealing here with Homo sapiens sapiens, even if of an early form, and not any sort of neanderthalensis. Given the separation in date between the Neanderthalers and moderns of the Levant, with the latter predating the former (except perhaps, for the Tabun woman), we can almost certainly drop the notion of a single variable population and conclude that we are here logging an early appearance of modern humanity – in fact, the best evidenced one – whose ancestry included no specifically Neanderthal forebears, followed by the presence in the same area at a later date of Neanderthalers.

  The Levantine moderns were tall on average (like the later Crô-Magnons of Europe), taller than most people today at 1.83 m for males and 1.7 m for females. Shins and forearms were long, unlike those of the Levantine (and other) Neanderthal folk, while pelvis shape was fully modern and un-Neanderthal. Their brains were on average bigger than those of most of us now (a trait they share with the majority of Neanderthalers, though the brains were differently shaped): these brain sizes probably relate to the bigger and more rugged physiques of the time. Seen from the back, the Qafzeh and Skhul skulls are high and parallel-sided just as ours are; cheeks are hollowed like most people’s today, and there is none of that distinctive pulled-forward Neanderthal look to the mid-face, though the lower part of the face is often markedly more prognathous (and sometimes rather more chinless) than we generally find among ourselves, with some big teeth in the back of the mouth (but no Neanderthal retromolar gap).