Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  The final triumph of the blade-making tendency seems to have been achieved in the Levantine region at some time soon after about 50,000 BP. Sites like Boker Tachtit in the Negev and El Wad at Mount Carmel may be witness to the emergence of the Upper Palaeolithic with blades out of the local Mousterian with flakes. Thereafter the Upper Palaeolithic spread quickly in the area and was soon making its way into Europe, its progress probably facilitated by a relatively warmer phase of the Last Ice Age which encouraged its makers, of presumably warm-loving build, to venture into the erstwhile colder regions. Once again we are faced with the dual lines of evidence afforded on the one hand by a few fossils of human types and on the other by rather more in the way of archaeological artefacts.

  In Europe, in the domain to date of the Neanderthalers with their Mousterian version of Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age toolmaking, it is possible to track the progress of the blade-based Upper Palaeolithic out of the Levantine region. At Ksar Akil in Lebanon, a properly Upper Palaeolithic blade industry dates to about 44,000 BP, while the oldest Upper Palaeolithic of Europe that has been discovered so far appears to be the Aurignacian material from Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria, from before 43,000 BP. The gap between these sites and a proto Upper Palaeolithic site like Boker Tachtit, at 47,000 BP, is small enough; the gap between Ksar Akil and Bacho Kiro is vanishingly small. At Boker Tachtit the emergence of the Upper from the Middle Palaeolithic is evidenced by the occurrences of cores from which first large Levallois flakes and then smaller true blades were struck; at Bacho Kiro the Aurignacian toolmaking tradition, the first of the European Upper Palaeolithic cultures (and the most uniformly widespread), is in place. It took perhaps some 3,000 to 5,000 years more for the Aurignacian to reach right across Europe to Spain, by about 39,000 BP.

  Aurignacian blades and scrapers (the longest about 5 cm).

  The appearance of the Aurignacian in Europe seems to coincide with relatively warmer times that facilitated its spread out of the Levantine region first into south-east Europe and then westwards across the continent. The strong presumption must be that the Aurignacian was carried into Europe by a population movement of modern types of humanity into the Mousterian territory of the Neanderthalers; wherever human remains have been found in association with the Aurignacian tool kit, those remains have always been of modern and never of Neanderthal type. It was not, of course, some purposeful invasive trek of moderns bent on reaching the Atlantic in short order but rather a slow spread like that, more than 30,000 years later, of the first farmers of Europe out of much the same Middle Eastern homelands.

  An Aurignacian split-base bone point, about 10 cm long.

  The Aurignacian is a very distinctive toolmaking tradition, markedly different in so many ways from the Mousterian. The emphasis is on narrow blades from carefully prepared cores rather than broad flakes, with characteristic end-worked and steeply retouched scrapers rather than Mousterian side-scrapers, and with bone and ivory points that are signally missing from Mousterian assemblages (as are items of personal decoration like beads which feature in the Levantine and European Aurignacian from the first). With very few exceptions, most of which can probably be explained by accidental mixing of material from different levels before or during excavation, there are no European instances of anything like the Negev and Mount Carmel sites where Upper Palaeolithic blade techniques emerge from within Middle Palaeolithic industries: the Aurignacian did not evolve out of a European Mousterian background. The exceptions, however, do look like cases of acculturation, where local Mousterian traditions took on board some Upper Palaeolithic traits and turned themselves into short-lived and geographically restricted pseudo Upper Palaeolithic cultures within the Aurignacian range. Two such acculturated Mousterian pockets may be represented by the Szeletian of Hungary and the Uluzzian of Italy, where a basically Middle Palaeolithic tradition with side-scrapers and denticulates is distinctively supplemented by Upper Palaeolithic elements like end-scrapers and burins (together with novel leaf-shaped points for the Szeletian that are really no more Upper than Middle Palaeolithic). Even these two cases (and something similar in southern Russia) of apparent acculturation may owe their character to mixing from Mousterian and true Upper Palaeolithic levels.

  All the same some acculturation between the incoming Aurignacian and the indigenous Mousterian (in a one-way direction from the former to the latter) seems quite likely to have occurred as the Upper Palaeolithic and its makers spread into Eastern and Central Europe – for it almost certainly happened later on in Western Europe as we shall shortly see. In the west it happened without any sign of physical interbreeding between Neanderthalers and moderns, but there is some reason to think that in the east a certain amount of interbreeding may have occurred. Staunch supporters of the ‘Out of Africa’ school of anthropology point to the mtDNA evidence, particularly in the light of the distance in terms of mtDNA of the original Neanderthal Man from any modern populations, as a strong argument against the Neanderthalers’ having had any part to play in the descent of modern Europeans through contact with the Aurignacian people. But it remains a possibility that Neanderthal nuclear DNA, which after all is the genetic material that actually controls our development, was imported for a time into the early Homo sapiens sapiens gene pool. Put bluntly, it is possible that Neanderthal males did on occasion impregnate early modern females, to produce offspring with some Neanderthal-derived traits that may even survive to the present in, mostly, European populations. The mtDNA evidence, aided perhaps by shrewd conjecture, does appear to rule out (so far as the published results from only the one Neanderthal specimen go) any likelihood that Aurignacian males regularly favoured Neanderthal females as partners. The anatomical evidence to support the idea of some Neanderthal input into the modern gene pool is not overwhelming by any means, but suggestive. There are specific details of nose and brow forms, of the shape of the back of the skull, of teeth and of the femur that persuade some anthropologists that something of the Neanderthalers came through into the earliest populations of Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe. Even among modern Europeans, thirty to forty thousand years further on, there is a higher incidence of something like the occipital bun, that was such a distinctive feature of the Neanderthal skull, than occurs among other peoples of the world today. Many of the fossils of early moderns in Europe also show a bony ridge over a nerve opening in the lower jaw that was common in the Neanderthalers; it is rarely seen in non-European fossil moderns and never among early Homo sapiens sapiens fossils from Africa. Front teeth of both Neanderthalers and some early moderns show a similar shovel shape. Committed supporters of the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis dismiss these details as unmeaningful coincidences, while die-hard multiregionalists lean on them to try to maintain, even with the European Neanderthalers, the notion that all the human populations of the world have come up together through more or less the same evolutionary stages at more or less the same speed, retaining local characteristics as they come. In the light of the archaeological evidence of the spread of the Aurignacian as a new and uniform tradition without Mousterian antecedence in Europe and of the complete dearth of European Neanderthalers with any signs of evolving fully sapiens physical traits, it has to be concluded that the multiregional hypothesis – whatever its merits in regard to the Far Eastern and Australasian evidence – breaks down where the Neanderthalers are concerned. The most that can be proposed is that some Neanderthal inheritance was mixed in Europe (and probably in the Levant, too) into the modern gene pool.

  The first moderns of Europe tend to be a ruggedly built crew, though without the cold-adapted body proportions and limb shapes of the Neanderthalers. Indeed, the warm-adapted, and so ‘African’, look of the long forearms and shins of many of the early moderns of Europe are features that argue against much in the way of interbreeding with the squat Neanderthalers. Though their relatively long legs may have gone back to experience in warmer climes, it is likely that they were still of advantage to the early moderns of Europe, in keeping with
their active and roaming style of life which saw them hunt further from ‘home’ and fetch their raw materials from further away than the Neanderthal folk did. Compared with the Neanderthalers, even the tallish and rugged early moderns of Europe were somewhat lightly built; this too may have been an advantage to them in northern climes, needing a little less food to fuel their bodies, for their lack of Neanderthal-style cold-adapted body proportions could be offset by their technological superiority and greater hunting powers.

  The skull shapes of the European early moderns may vary to a degree (and even display some traits that may relate them to the Neanderthalers as we have seen) but essentially they display high-rising foreheads over unpronounced brows (though males show more than females) that seldom if ever meet in bars over the eyes; high brain-cases that are short when seen from the side and parallel-sided when seen from the back (though they can sometimes be longer and lower than is usual today); short and tucked-in faces without inflated cheeks and that Neanderthal pulled-out look; and, usually, rather delicate jaws with smallish teeth and marked chin development to act as a strengthener when overall jaw robusticity was reduced. Improvements in the range and usefulness of Upper Palaeolithic tools, and perhaps of cooking techniques too, helped to facilitate jaw and teeth reduction when great strength in the mouth was no longer so badly needed. The tucking-in of the jaw under a shorter, higher skull has been judged, also, to coincide with an increased flexing of the skull base and repositioning of the pharynx needed for full articulation of speech.

  A skull from Mladeč, with something of a bun at the rear, but high and straight-sided when seen from the back.

  An adult male from Předmosti.

  Among the first appearances of modern types (all with Aurignacian tool kits) in the European territory hitherto populated by the Neanderthalers (with their various sorts of Mousterian) we may note finds at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria at 43,000 or more years ago (jaw and tooth fragments), at Velika Pečina in Croatia at more than 34,000 BP (skull pieces with high forehead and slight brows), at Mladeč in Moravia at some 35,000 BP (several strong-browed males and unbrowed females with, in some cases, those Neanderthal-like buns but flat and reduced faces), at Vogelherd in Germany at about the same age as Mladeč (and of about the same character), at Předmosti in Moravia at before 30,000 BP (a mass grave of mammoth hunters includes some skulls with rather prominent brows, prognathous faces and suggestions of a bun that are otherwise fully modern in type), and – best known of all – at the Crô-Magnon shelter at les Eyzies in France. This site has given its name to the entire type of early European moderns and it is still convenient to use the name, with reservations.

  The old man’s skull from Crǒ-Magnon, back view.

  The Crô-Magnon ‘mausoleum’, with three adult males, one adult female and a child, was discovered as long ago as 1868 by workmen labouring on the laying of the railway track that still runs just across the road from the subsequently built Crô-Magnon hotel. Obviously, the Crô-Magnon shelter was not investigated with any modern archaeological finesse but it seems clear that the skeletons were laid to rest in a context with Aurignacian tools and faunal remains of reindeer, bison and mammoth – pierced animal teeth and shells appear to have constituted the grave goods of the departed. To go by the Aurignacian tools in a French context, we may estimate the date of the human remains to be some 34,000–30,000 BP. The skulls are of such fully modern type and the limb bones show the long shins and forearms of the moderns to such a degree that doubts have occasionally been raised as to the early date of the remains, which were lying on the surface of the rock shelter floor – but then, so were the animal bones and tools, and the Crô-Magnon skeletons are no more outlandishly modern than the bones from Mladeč and Předmosti. At Crô-Magnon, too, there is variation between the skulls in extent of brow-ridge development and in the shape at the back. The ‘old man’ of Crô-Magnon (who has distinctively rectangular eye sockets) presents a face pitted by fungal infection (see p. 20), while the woman survived a fractured skull and there is evidence of fusing of neck vertebrae: all features that point to a hard life where the status of old man meant being barely middle-aged in our terms. By the time the moderns were reaching south-west Europe, life was indeed hard with the beginning of a return to glacial conditions after the interstadial improvement that helped to usher them out of the Levant and into south-east Europe a few thousands of years before.

  The bones of the early Upper Palaeolithic people, from all over Europe, go to make up a picture of a varied population of Homo sapiens sapiens, with quite a range of types that sometimes resemble not only modern Europeans but also people living in other parts of the world today. Not too much should be made of this as it is mostly a matter of skull details in a small sample that has come down to us from a small population in the first place. We do not know what skin colour they had, nor the colour and character of their hair. (Though the Upper Palaeolithic people often painted animals on cave walls with considerable naturalism, their few pictures of themselves are very stylized and useless for getting any idea of what they really looked like.) In the past the matter of their body build and stature has been overdone by writers intent on making comparisons that were unfavourable to the Neanderthalers: the Crô-Magnon folk were on average about 1.73 m tall for males and 1.55 m for females, with male brains averaging just under 1600 ml and female ones just under 1400 ml. Though slender, their limb bones were not always all that long even by comparison with average Neanderthalers. Whatever population growths and movements have happened since their day, it is certain that modern European populations still carry many of their genes.

  Chatelperronian knives.

  Crô-Magnon type bones have been found in association with Aurignacian tools at another French site called les Rois; the people and the toolmaking tradition appear to have arrived together in Western Europe by some time after 40,000 BP. (They may have reached Spain earlier than south-west France, along the Mediterranean coast.) For the ensconced Neanderthalers of the region, this was the time of their first encounter with very different people equipped with a different and better tool kit and, it seems certain, a better strategy to survive and prosper even in the harsh climate to which the Neanderthalers had made such a complete adaptation. The Neanderthalers were not to long outlive the encounter. At some sites in northern Spain and France there seems to be a change without hiatus from underlying Mousterian to immediately overlying Aurignacian; at others there is a sterile interval between the two occupations, as though the Neanderthalers who made the Mousterian had gone away never to return before the fully moderns arrived with their Aurignacian. In no case does a Mousterian assemblage overlie an Aurignacian one. But at three sites, two of them in France, and one in Spain, a tool tradition called Chatelperronian, that contains many Mousterian elements alongside Upper Palaeolithic ones, has been found interstratified with Aurignacian. This interstratification of the two cultures, showing that their makers came and went and returned to the same sites in these three instances, demonstrates a period of coexistence between them, with the possibility at least of some interaction. There is no doubt that the Chatelperronian is rooted in the late Mousterian variant called MAT-B (Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition, later version, where the small hand-axes of the variant are not abundant but backed flakes – blunted along one edge – are). The Chatelperronian shows such MAT-B elements as backed flakes, side-scrapers, denticulate pieces and even some small bifacial axes; its geographical distribution is the same as the MAT-B’s. But at the same time there are in the Chatelperronian true blades, end-scrapers, burins, some bone and antler tools and ornamental pieces like perforated animal teeth: items very rare (to say the least) as individual pieces in Mousterian assemblages and never seen together in force. At one time it was thought that this Chatelperronian might be an independent local innovation out of the MAT-B at the very beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, predating the Aurignacian, and even that the makers of the MAT-B might already have evolved from Neanderthal ancesto
rs into modern types well before developing the Chatelperronian. But dates for the Aurignacian and the Chatelperronian soon showed that the European-wide Aurignacian had arrived in France and Cantabria by the time of the Chatelperronian, and the subsequent discoveries of interstratification proved them contemporaneous, without any priority for the Chatelperronian. Human teeth found with the Chatelperronian at the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure in the Paris Basin hinted strongly that this culture was the work of Neanderthalers and then the discovery, in 1979, of a human skeleton in association with the Chatelperronian at Saint-Césaire in the Charente-Maritime clinched the matter – for the skeleton was that of a classic Neanderthaler. It was now to all intents and purposes certain that the Chatelperronian, with its mixture of Mousterian and Upper Palaeolithic traits, was the work of pure Neanderthalers.