by Paul Jordan
Acculturation seems to be the only explanation for the Chatelperronian. Its Neanderthal makers, with their long Mousterian inheritance, must have been influenced by the incoming Aurignacian to introduce various Upper Palaeolithic elements into their toolmaking tradition, and indeed into other aspects of their lives (like the wearing of personal adornments). Even so, Chatelperronian tools were still made by different techniques and from differently sourced raw material vis-à-vis the Aurignacian products. Where they overlapped in their use of the same sites at different times, the makers of the Aurignacian seem to have favoured the hunting of reindeer as their speciality while the Chatelperronians hunted (and perhaps scavenged) less discriminately, taking horse, bovids and red deer in addition to reindeer. Perhaps, in the early days, while Aurignacian population numbers were still small, it was the differences in lifestyles between the two peoples that allowed a measure of coexistence. Perhaps the Neanderthalers had been weakened by the decline, during the milder interstadial that saw the entry of the Crô-Magnon types into Europe, of their familiar world of ice age conditions to which they had become so attuned. It is fascinating to wonder just how the coexistence of the two sorts of people went on in practice and how the acculturation of the Neanderthalers into Upper Palaeolithic ways was achieved.
The physical remains of the Saint-Césaire Neanderthaler come from the higher (later) of two Chatelperronian layers of the site, dated by TL to around 36,000 BP. The body of this male Neanderthaler was flexed and buried in a small oval grave, in which were preserved the right half of the skull, a shoulder blade, robust arm bones, some ribs and fragments of shin and kneecap. The skull is classically Neanderthal in character, except perhaps for some reduction in the typical mid-face prognathism of the breed which does not look sufficient to set us guessing at any interbreeding with Crô-Magnon types or at any rapid evolution towards modern Homo sapiens sapiens. (With modern types already in full swing at places like Vogelherd by about 35,000 BP, there seems insufficient time, in even the most optimistic multiregional terms, for the European Neanderthalers to have evolved into European moderns in situ, now that we find classic Neanderthal types still around at 36,000 BP and later, as we shall also see.)
At Arcy the Chatelperronian levels incorporate evidence of hut building in the form of a rough circle of eleven post holes enclosing a 4 m wide area (with two hearths) partially paved with limestone slabs – the holes probably for mammoth tusks and bones as structural elements in view of the abundance of such bones on the site and the dearth of tree pollen to indicate the availability of timber. The huts, the Upper Palaeolithic tools and the bone points are impressive enough innovations for Neanderthalers of Mousterian background; they demonstrate the ability of these people to pick up on new ideas if not to pioneer them. But perhaps we should set most store by the Chatelperronian adoption of items of personal decoration (the pierced animal teeth) when we come to give them their due. Apart from the possibility of body painting (or decoration of clothing) which is unlikely ever to be established, the Neanderthalers show no signs of personal adornment until the Chatelperronian episode. To have seen the point of body decoration with beads of pierced teeth and to have taken it up as a habit perhaps says more about Neanderthal mentality than anything else; personal adornment is a very social thing, with potential implications about status in terms of sex and hierarchy as well as about aesthetic sensibility. Nothing about the archaeology of the Neanderthalers, except to an extent for their graves and their bear ‘cult’, has had much light to shed on this side of their natures until the Chatelperronian beads at more or less the end of the Neanderthalers’ career on earth. Even so, the personal adornment of the Chatelperronian is a poor thing by comparison with what was soon to go on among the Upper Palaeolithic people, and the Chatelperronians produced absolutely no art that we know of. They seem to have been capable of seeing some point to personal decoration, but not to have been able to innovate it for themselves, except by imitation.
Hut emplacement at Arcy with stones, mammoth bones, post holes (black) and hearths (hatched areas).
The Chatelperronian was a short-lived late flowering of Neanderthal potential, probably only a few thousand years in duration. A Neanderthal temporal bone from Arcy is dated to about 34,000 BP with Chatelperronian associations. And despite the emergence of the Chatelperronian from a MAT-B background, it did not supersede all forms of Mousterian either in France or Spain. The latest French Mousterians, at les Cottés and la Balme, are dated by C14 to about 30,000 BP but should probably be corrected to a slightly earlier date as a result of refinements of carbon dating. In Spain a Neanderthal lower jaw found at Zaffaraya dates to some 33,000 BP (perhaps even a little later) and was discovered in association with a Mousterian industry; bones in a hearth at the site suggest the cooking of goat meat and the melancholy thought may cross our minds of Neanderthal Man’s eating a hearty breakfast for his last meal in his final refuge, with the Crô-Magnonards beating at the door.
But perhaps after all, the Iberian Neanderthalers at least did not perish altogether without issue. A newly reported find from Leiria, north of Lisbon, offers possible evidence for the survival of Neanderthal physical traits into Crô-Magnon times. The skeleton of a little girl, buried with a seashell necklace and coloured with red ochre, is said to show at about 24,500 BP a Neanderthal stockiness of trunk and leg bones alongside more Crô-Magnon features of chin development, teeth and arm bones (though the top of the skull, where the brows might have told us more, was broken by a farm tractor before discovery). Claims for a period of interbreeding between Crô-Magnon and Neanderthal types have again been advanced on the basis of this new find.
In all probability the Neanderthal folk who survived unchanged into Aurignacian times were simply outcompeted and marginalized to extinction rather than hunted down and exterminated. Though they were evidently able to coexist for a time with the moderns and to acculturate from them in some circumstances, even to interbreed with them to some extent, it seems likely that differences persisted in habits, in technological aptitude, in hunting prowess, in language (and language skills), in appearance, in mating predelictions and in social arrangements, and that all these differences and others we cannot now discern might have kept the two sorts of humanity largely apart. The moderns, from everything we know of their technological and ideological achievements, were cleverer and more flexible than the Neanderthalers; as climate deteriorated again at around 30,000 BP, it might only have taken one or two thousands of years of slightly inferior hunting performance, slightly shorter life expectancy, slightly lower birth rate and slightly higher infant mortality for the Neanderthalers to disappear in the face of the moderns’ better record in all these areas. It is rather like the decline of Britain’s native red squirrels in the face of the imported grey species; interestingly, the reds were already in slight decline before the arrival of the robust greys, who are more successful hunters and produce more offspring, but do not physically attack the reds. A natural sympathy for the underdog and the disadvantaged lends a sad poignancy to the fate of the Neanderthal folk, however it came about.
Epilogue
As the evidence currently stands, it looks extremely unlikely that the classic Neanderthalers of Europe can have evolved directly into the Upper Palaeolithic people. There is not a big enough time gap between the last of the Neanderthalers at places like Saint-Césaire and the first of the moderns who brought in the Aurignacian – indeed there is no gap at all, and we have seen the evidence for moderns in Africa and the Levant at much earlier dates. In Western Europe there is, moreover, no body of evidence of any admixture at all of Neanderthal physical traits into the early modern inhabitants of the Aurignacian and succeeding periods, even though the case of the Chatelperronian indicates that cultural, if not genetic, traits could cross between the two peoples (though seemingly only by the one-way street from moderns to Neanderthalers). In Central and Eastern Europe there is perhaps slightly stronger indication that some interbreeding between
Neanderthalers and moderns may have gone on, though here too the evidence never approaches the implication that any wholesale evolution from Neanderthal to modern types can have taken place, even with genetic input from outside. The evidence of physical anthropology (with remains like those of the Levantine moderns at 90,000 BP), the evidence of genetics (with the great distance of the Neanderthal mtDNA from that of any people in the world today) and the evidence of archaeology (with the spread of the Aurignacian, never associated with anything but moderns’ bones, out of the Levant after about 45,000 BP) all point to the sidelining of the Neanderthalers of Europe in the face of the arrival of the moderns. The moderns carried the day and the question forces itself upon us as to the secret of their success. And even if the views of the most extreme multiregionalists were one day to be vindicated by new evidence to bolster the idea of rapid Neanderthal evolution into Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe, we should still have to ask why the modern sort of humanity took hold so quickly and completely (and not just in Europe, but all over the world). What was it about the moderns that ultimately let them thrive so readily, to the eclipse of other sorts of humanity like the Neanderthalers and their cultural traditions?
We have seen that modern physical types, as far as we can tell from their bones, were on the scene in Africa and the Levant by about 90,000 BP. Unless some breakthrough in the interpretation of interior skull formation allows us to come to firm conclusions about differing levels of brain performance among different fossil remains in comparison with ourselves, we shall not get any further with an answer to the question about the origins of modern human behaviour from the physical remains themselves. It seems unlikely any such breakthrough will be made, so we have only the archaeological evidence of what human beings were doing to go on when we try to characterize and account for the beginnings of the modern human career. In fact, the archaeology of the Upper Palaeolithic, though it can only represent a few surviving traces of past activity in the shape of flints and bone work, graves and artistic productions, is really very rich and suggestive. The Aurignacian culture, the first of the Upper Palaeolithic succession, comes in with a surprising uniformity across Europe from the Middle East. (This situation in itself argues against any evolution out of the preceding Mousterian for the Aurignacian, since the various versions of Mousterian across the range to be colonized by the Aurignacian were themselves not so very uniform, with distinct regional differences, though at the same time less rich in detail than the Aurignacian.) But after a few thousand years of the Aurignacian, real cultural diversity set in for the rest of the Upper Palaeolithic sequence with relatively short-lived and regionally diverse toolmaking traditions that show great inventiveness and sheer style in a way that the Mousterian never did. These traits must bear witness to a very different state of mind on the part of the makers of the upper Palaeolithic traditions from that of any previous peoples, including those very early moderns of Africa and the Levant who contented themselves with Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age tools just like their Neanderthal contemporaries.
People have speculated as to whether some brand-new neurological evolution took place in the brains of the early moderns, between the time of the Klasies River Mouth and Mount Carmel specimens and the time of the first makers of the Aurignacian in the Middle East and Europe: some neurological evolution deep inside the neocortex of their brains that is quite invisible to us when we examine the brain casts on the inside of their skulls. This speculation remains valid, but it also remains possible that the brains of the first moderns of a hundred thousand years ago were already every bit as versatile from the first as yours and mine but not yet put, for cultural reasons, to the sort of uses that have characterized humanity since the establishment of the Upper Palaeolithic – not until culture, in the broadest sense, had elaborated itself into complex social relations, complex linguistic expression and complex symbolism could the brains of the moderns fully flower. But, of course, those brains would never have evolved in the first place unless nature set some store by them in a way that gave their owners selective advantage over rivals – mostly other forms of humanity – for the ecological niche they exploited. Without making better tools than their Neanderthal (and, in some parts of the world, late erectus) contemporaries, the first of the moderns may well have already been doing something better with their evolved brain-cases; those slightly superior hunting strategies in Palestine mentioned in the previous chapter may be among the things they were doing better, and perhaps their grave-goods point to some greater social cohesion, some better network of supportive relations that could be manifested even in death. Both of these traits would be examples of better functioning of more fully integrated minds: in one case, of reading the signs of the natural world better, to hunt more flexibly and economically in terms of effort by season; in the other case, of more vividly recognizing family and kinship relations to the point where not just the old and infirm but even the dead could be imaginatively brought into the fold of human mutuality.
As far back as the early moderns of Israel at some 90,000 BP, the evidence for distinctively modern human behaviour (and, it has to be said, the interpretation of that evidence) is thin: the seasonal hunting and perhaps more certain grave-goods of the Levantine early moderns vs. the Neanderthalers do not amount to so very much. When we come to the European Upper Palaeolithic, the difference between Neanderthal behaviour (indeed, all former human behaviour) and Crô-Magnon behaviour is striking indeed. Where the tools are concerned, there is variety and sophistication on a scale not evidenced before: many more blades than were ever seen among the stray blade manifestations of earlier times, made with soft hammers and punches (of wood and bone) to judge by the percussion patterns on them; new blade-based forms like keeled and nosed scrapers, complex burins (the bone carving and engraving tools), edge-retouched blades and microlithic bladelets; much use of bone and antler to make spear points (some split-based for hafting), rods and tubes unknown in the Middle Palaeolithic (though we recall the enigmatic harpoons of Katanda). By about 25,000 BP needles were being made of bone in Central Europe, a little later on in France: sewn clothes, of animal hides, must have been much more tailored than ever before. At Sungir in Russia elaborate clothing is indicated by patterns of beads that were attached to the clothes, while the sites of Barma Grande and Arene Candide in Italy suggest that different dress codes could be applied to men and women. Entirely new in the Upper Palaeolithic is the marked adoption of articles of personal adornment like perforated animal teeth and shells and beads made of ivory and attractive stones like steatite and serpentine. The widespread production and wearing of such ornaments must bear witness to a great change in human social relations and psychology: visual differentiation among individuals points to complexity of social relations across a network of people who know and recognize one another and have their places in the social scheme. Personal adornment similarly hints at a developed sense of self vis-à-vis one’s fellows – it may be that the arrival of the self as a fully conscious entity is memorialized by the appearance of beads in the archaeological record. It is interesting to note, too, that population sizes increased with the Upper Palaeolithic, with many more archaeological sites and evidence for the transport of materials (like favoured flint supplies and decorative materials) over much greater distances than had occurred in Mousterian times. There were more people, more societies and more interchanges between societies in networks over greater distances.
Gravettian artefacts.
Among these Upper Palaeolithic societies cultural diversity soon manifested itself, in contrast with the painfully slow evolution of Mousterian (and all previous) culture. By about 28,000 BP the Gravettian tradition replaced the Aurignacian, with small and parallel-sided blades, often pointed and very steeply retouched (‘backed’) along one edge, and bone awls and punches but no Aurignacian bone points. For a few thousand years around 20,000 BP the distinctive Solutrean culture flourished in France, producing a range of leaf-shaped flints of such excepti
onal (and otiose) workmanship that we are tempted to see the Solutrean as a fashionable jeu d’esprit like art deco, though lasting about three hundred times as long (still short, of course, by previous standards of cultural change). After about 18,000 BP the Magdalenian tradition began, itself to pass through many phases, with great abundance and variety of bone and antler work, some of it highly decorative in character, and a range of often microlithic products that were clearly employed in composite tools with bone and wooden handles. The Magdalenian and its derivatives reached to the end of the last ice age in Western Europe.
