The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  About the Authors

  Dimitra Papagianni holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge and was a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton, where she retains an affiliation. She has taught courses on the Neanderthals for continuing education at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bath. She is the author of Middle Palaeolithic Occupation and Technology in Northwestern Greece and co-editor of Time and Change: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on the Long-Term in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

  Michael A. Morse holds a PhD in the history of science from the University of Chicago. He is the author of How the Celts Came to Britain, selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2005.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World

  The Complete World of Human Evolution

  Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art

  The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies

  Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods

  The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

  The Splendour of Lascaux: Rediscovering the Greatest Treasure of Prehistoric Art

  See our websites

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  For Eleana, Yanni and Vasili

  Contents

  Preface

  CHAPTER one

  A Long Underestimated Type of Human

  CHAPTER two

  The First Europeans:

  1 million to 600,000 years ago

  CHAPTER three

  Defeating the Cold:

  600,000 to 250,000 years ago

  CHAPTER four

  Meet the Neanderthals:

  250,000 to 130,000 years ago

  CHAPTER five

  An End to Isolation:

  130,000 to 60,000 years ago

  CHAPTER six

  Endgame:

  60,000 to 25,000 years ago

  CHAPTER seven

  Still With Us?

  Bibliography

  Sources of illustrations

  Index

  Copyright

  Preface

  Late one warm summer night in 2007, Mike drove from the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, to our home in a village outside the city and turned on the computer. His task was to tell friends and family the good news that Dimitra had just given birth to twins, and that all three of them were doing fine. When he opened his email, there was a new message from Thames & Hudson. It seemed that our Neanderthal book proposal had been accepted. The question was, with newborn twins, how could we now find time to write it?

  We had no way of knowing it then, but this was a lucky coincidence. Had we met the original September 2008 contractual deadline, the book would have been immediately obsolete. The pace of new discoveries has been staggering. For example, when we started writing Chapter Two on the human colonization of Europe, the accepted time of arrival was 800,000 years ago. By the time we had finished the first draft some weeks later, it was 1.2 million years ago. In another case, a new discovery in Kenya set a new age record for handaxe tool technology at 1.76 million years ago. It was not just new discoveries, but the development of new technologies that brought about the greatest changes.

  The most startling news came in 2010, by which point we had put the writing on hold in order to move the family across the ocean to America. (We’d like to think that this makes the book the ultimate Thames & Hudson publication, because we started it close to one river and finished it a few miles from the other.) Had we submitted the book before this announcement, we would have missed out on a crucial line of evidence from the emerging field of palaeogenetics.

  The idea for this book dates back much earlier, some twenty years before the current golden age of discovery, to our student days. Dimitra, who once excavated royal Roman tombs in Cyprus, explained why she spent so much time studying stone tools from 100,000 years ago, when the Earth still held untold secrets – hidden cities buried by desert sands, Egyptian tombs, cave paintings. She said that her work was the most interesting of all, for ultimately she was exploring what it means to be human. Mike, who studied archaeology as a historian of science, slowly became drawn in to this field, which goes by the misleadingly boring name of Middle Palaeolithic archaeology. Eventually we felt that we could combine our skills to write something that neither of us could do alone. Dimitra remains the real archaeologist in this endeavour, while Mike helped to shape the narrative.

  Dimitra’s connection to the Neanderthals goes back much earlier. In Chapter Five we discuss the Neanderthal site of Kokkinopilos in Greece, and a Nazi guard post that stands atop it. The historian Mark Mazower mentions the survival of such guard posts in his book Inside Hitler’s Greece (1993), where he also describes a massacre by the Nazis in the nearby village of Kouklesi, carried out in revenge for an attack by the resistance. One of the victims of this massacre was a teenage boy named Dimitrios, who was not in the resistance but who had the bad luck to be caught wearing a shirt that was made in Britain, casting suspicion on him.

  Years later, Dimitrios’s brother, Anastasios, was asked by friends in the nearby village of Rizovouni to become godfather to their newborn daughter. Anastasios agreed, and according to tradition was able to name the child. He named her after his murdered brother, choosing the female version of the name. Dimitra later became involved with a Cambridge project in the region and ended up writing her PhD dissertation on the stone tools of Kokkinopilos – a short distance from her village – and other redbed sites in the region.

  The greatest lesson we have learned from studying the Neanderthals is not to demean them. When we tell friends about this project, they often say something sarcastic like, ‘I know a few Neanderthals you might include in the book.’ We’ll only know we succeeded if people start to show the Neanderthals some deserved respect. They were accomplished humans, too. Plus, it’s cowardly. If you had made fun of them directly to their chinless faces, they might have torn your arms off.

  Our main motivation for writing this book, however, has been our conviction that the Neanderthal story is a compelling one – one that has not previously been told in its entire dramatic arc from origins to expansion to demise. Most books with the word ‘Neanderthal’ in the title seem to collapse the species into an ahistorical list of features and important sites before morphing into a book on the species that replaced them. We wanted to write a book on the Neanderthals that does not dwell too much on the false turns in the long history of research and does not get easily distracted by the entry of Homo sapiens on to the scene. In short, we envisioned a book on the Neanderthals that is fairly exclusively about the Neanderthals.

  The need for a book like this became apparent when Dimitra started teaching a course called The Neanderthal World in various university continuing education programmes. Her course was unusual in that it looked at human evolution from the Neanderthal point of view, and she discovered that it was immensely popular. Students kept asking her to recommend a book, and she realized there was no good single source on the Neanderthals. The most comprehensive book was In Search of the Neanderthals by Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble. Published back in 1993, this was becoming out of date and did not have anything on the exciting new discoveries.
While there are many good books to recommend that touch on the topic, we wanted to bring all the threads of the Neanderthal story together in one place.

  We think the rise and fall of the Neanderthals is one of the greatest stories from the prehistoric past. After more than 150 years of archaeological discovery, the Neanderthals are the best-known human species other than ourselves. They are the one most closely related to us. And they coexisted with us quite recently: for the last Neanderthals, the earliest modern human art in Europe may have been thousands of years old already. For all these reasons, we had long wanted to share our fascination with them. It was just a matter of timing. And given how much more we know now than we knew when we started this journey, we hope you’ll agree that the best time is, in fact, now.

  It is impossible to write about a million years of prehistory, including sites from western Europe to central Asia, and about fields as disparate as biological anthropology, genetics, geology and archaeology, without tremendous help. We are indebted to our many friends and colleagues who have helped guide our thinking. This book could not have been written without them. At the same time, we have presented the Neanderthal story through the filter of our own idiosyncratic choices, and responsibility for those, and indeed any mistakes, is ours alone.

  We would particularly like to thank Mircea Anghelinu, Nick Ashton, Jill Cook, Clive Gamble, Ivor Karavanić, Mark Lamster, Paul Pettitt, Nellie Phoca-Cosmetatou, Matt Pope, Wil Roebroeks, Antonio Rosas, Katharine Scott, Chris Stringer, Aaron Stutz, Carolyn Szmidt and Carole Watkin.

  Our editor, Colin Ridler at Thames & Hudson, played a very large role in shaping the book, and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Sincere thanks are also due to the rest of the team there: Kim Richardson, Louise Thomas, Sarah Vernon-Hunt, Aaron Hayden, Terry Martin, Celia Falconer and Steve Russell.

  A key aspect of Neanderthal research is reconsidering what it means to be human. As we were delving into the human past to answer this question, we were also becoming intimately familiar with a different kind of human mind – the autistic one – within our own family. For teaching us the true essence of humanity and for being a constant source of joy, we dedicate this book to the boys who were born the same night that Thames & Hudson gave the project the green light, and to their sister who has become at least as enthusiastic about the Neanderthals as we are.

  TIMELINE

  Simplified timeline of the past million years, correlating climate changes (indicated by the Marine Isotope Stages, with the dark bands signifying warm stages) with different species of human and their stone tool technologies in Africa, Europe and Asia.

  CHAPTER one

  A Long Underestimated Type of Human

  From our perspective as Homo sapiens, it can be tempting to look back on human evolution with a sense of triumph and destiny. With our large brains, crafty hands, agile legs and complex social networks, it was surely inevitable that when the conditions became favourable, we would assume our rightful place at the very pinnacle of nature. But perhaps it is a little too easy to claim this now that we have no serious rivals, and certainly no human ones.

  We are only one variety, ‘modern humans’, of up to a dozen human species that have shared our world in the last two million years or so. And our direct ancestors were not always in the leading position. If we could rewind the clock to the last time the world was as warm and stable as it is today – some 120,000 mostly icy and climatically erratic years ago – we would probably not feel as privileged as we do now. Back then, the Neanderthals – a species much like us, only stronger – were on the march. With unprecedented abilities to survive cold climates, this rival species might have been the prime candidate to populate the whole Earth from its origin point in Europe and push other forms of human to extinction. Over some tens of thousands of years from that point, the weather deteriorated, and enormous ice sheets advanced in the northern latitudes. Somehow, the particular human species native to Europe managed to survive these hardships, while our ancestors faced warmer challenges in Africa and, later, tropical Asia.

  Fast-forward to about 45,000 years ago, when modern humans first ventured into a Europe half-covered by glaciers. There they encountered a form of human that, unlike themselves, had already lived through several cold episodes. Yet it was the warm-adapted Homo sapiens that survived this most recent glacial cycle. The cold-adapted Neanderthals failed, dying out in the millennia after our ancestors arrived in their homeland.

  The species equivalent of our first cousins, the Neanderthals were unmistakably different from modern humans, with large, barrel-shaped chests, stocky and muscular bodies, broad noses and chins that did not protrude. They shared many of our behaviours, but their development seemed to trail ours in some key areas, such as our capacity for symbolic expression.

  Even their world was alien to ours. The open, steppe-like landscapes that prevailed in Europe in their heyday enjoyed good exposure to sunlight and had rich vegetation that sustained sizeable populations of mammoth, bison, deer and horse – species essential to the Neanderthal diet. Neanderthal landscapes were unlike the barren steppes of present-day Eurasia or, indeed, any landscapes anywhere in today’s world.

  The Neanderthals are the only native European species in the human family tree, and this alone has fostered an enduring fascination with them. Europe has a much longer history of archaeological investigation and research, and therefore a richer record of its distant past, than any other part of the world. We have known them longer – since we discovered them in the 19th century – than any other extinct form of human.

  And because the Neanderthals are a relatively recent species, their fossilized bones, the remains of their everyday lives and even their DNA are well preserved. The Neanderthals are not just one of our closest relatives. They are also the ones we know best. With Neanderthals, we are as close as we will ever get to another species from the human evolutionary past.

  Like so many people who are different from us, the Neanderthals are now known mainly for the use of their name as a pejorative. In this book, we do not pretend to be able to correct this popular usage, but we do hope to restore some dignity to those we replaced.

  The Neanderthals have always been a little too close for comfort for the modern western world. Their name conjures up images of muscular but dim-witted cavemen who relied on force over cunning. When a New York Times arts critic recently wrote about ‘Neanderthal TV’ he was referring not to a documentary on human evolution, but to programmes that feature ‘deeply flawed’ male characters with ‘antisocial tendencies’. The name can also be a source of humour. A rock band called The Neanderthals dresses in animal skins and sings simplistic songs about girls. We think this is all unfair.

  Too often the Neanderthal story is told simply as a backdrop to our own, a reflection of the same obsession with our own species found in our creation stories. Yet there is a gentle counter-current to this sapiens-centrism, a growing sense of collective guilt that appears in the most unlikely places. We once came across a bottle cap that, for no clear reason, declared: ‘The brain of Neanderthal man was larger than that of modern man.’ It was a reminder that, of all the large mammal species whose extinction we have witnessed in recent millennia, at least one seems to have been our equal in brain capacity, if not in humanity.

  In recent years new research has pulled the Neanderthals much closer to us. Not only did they have brains as large as ours (though their skulls had a different, flatter shape), they also buried their dead, cared for the disabled, hunted animals in their prime, used a form of spoken language and even lived in some of the same places as the modern humans who were, broadly speaking, their contemporaries. They could not have survived, even in warmer times, had they not mastered fire and worn clothes. Though they relied heavily on meat, they consumed seeds and plants, including herbs, and could fish and harvest sea food. These are all behaviours that at some point were thought to be exclusive to ourselves.

  A golden age of research

  T
he pace of progress in our understanding of the Neanderthals keeps accelerating. Thanks to some breathtaking recent discoveries and scientific advances, we can now examine the story of the Neanderthals in greater depth than was previously thought possible. This is truly the golden age of Neanderthal research, making it the perfect time to see how all the strands of evidence fit together into a narrative of the rise and fall of a long underestimated type of human.

  When we started studying the Neanderthals in the early 1990s as graduate students, much of what is now our current knowledge was the subject of heated debate. Most of this debate revolved around the Neanderthals’ role in our own story. In those days, for example, it was not yet clear whether the Neanderthals and modern humans ever shared the same continent at the same time. (We now know they did.)

  Archaeologists were then still absorbing the implications of a genetic study that supported the so-called Out of Africa theory, that all living modern humans can be traced back genetically to a single woman (or a small group of women) in sub-Saharan Africa. The entry of genetic evidence into archaeology exposed sharp divisions in the discipline. Although the Out of Africa theory was about the evolutionary trajectories of all modern human populations, Europe and the Neanderthals were a key part of the debate. The dominant question in Neanderthal research at the time was whether they were part of our evolutionary ancestry or whether they had been replaced, either after a hiatus or by being out-competed – perhaps even killed off – by modern humans who had originated in Africa and migrated into Europe.

  In 1993 Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble published their landmark volume, In Search of the Neanderthals, which put forward the case that modern humans replaced, rather than evolved from, the Neanderthals. Little did we realize that this was just the beginning of a wave of new insights and evidence about our evolutionary kin, and that the question of our replacement of the Neanderthals would re-emerge forcibly with further genetic studies.