The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  The first French Revolution

  For the first 1.5 million years after the invention of the handaxe, there was little improvement in stone technology. This represents more than 80 per cent of the time since Homo erectus crafted the first handaxe near Lake Turkana, Kenya, 1.76 million years ago. It is impossible to conceive how long this is – how many humans decided to make a handaxe, to use it, to throw it away, and never to imagine that there might be a better way to make cutting tools.

  Looking back, it is easy for us to see inefficiencies in the ways humans used handaxes. They are large and unwieldy, take a great deal of skill and time to make and are not the kind of thing you want to carry over long distances. People would spend the time to make handaxes and then kill and butcher game all in the same area, leaving everything behind that they did not eat (or wear). Handaxes, despite their size, were the equivalent of disposable razors in the early prehistoric world.

  The first hints of innovation started to appear more than 400,000 years ago in northern France. The idea came in fits and starts, and there is evidence of experimentation with new techniques during a time when Europe entered the Great Interglacial, an extended period of favourable climate. From around 427,000 years ago down to 301,000 years ago Europe was mainly warm, with one short (in geological terms) 30,000-year glaciation. This is the period we reviewed in Chapter Three, when many European fossils showed signs of ‘neanderthalization’.

  Europe then became cold again, and when this next glacial cycle ended around 250,000 years ago, new ideas for better ways of making cutting tools had matured and taken root across the continent. Using these novel toolmaking techniques, humans were able to travel greater distances. By carrying not just their tools, but material they prepared especially for making new tools, they could go further away from flint sources, they could take longer, riskier journeys and they could meet more humans on the way.

  Perhaps the most surprising thing about this innovation is how it logically follows from handaxe manufacture; it seems remarkable that no one had thought of it for 1.5 million years. And the second most surprising thing, at least for those who previously took a dim view of Neanderthal abilities, is that the Neanderthals in Europe came up with the idea all by themselves. We know this because the technology did not appear suddenly but can be traced back into the past of the same sites where it flourished 250,000 years ago. In South Africa the ancestors of Homo sapiens were following a similar trajectory of tool development, and in Georgia (with no associated hominin bones) there has been a more recent discovery of the local development of these tools, but the European dates are as old as the African and Asian ones.

  So significant is this change in tool technology that archaeologists use it to mark the transition from the Lower Palaeolithic (the lower ‘old stone age’, which is the earliest period that archaeologists name) to the Middle Palaeolithic. This is the first technological transition in a series that later takes us to the Upper Palaeolithic, Neolithic (‘new stone age’), Bronze Age, Iron Age and onward to historic times. In other words, for archaeologists, the emergence of Middle Palaeolithic tools was the first major step towards modern technology since the emergence of humans and of complex toolmaking in Africa.

  The village of Levallois, in a north-western suburb of Paris, France, is named after Nicolas-Eugène Levallois, an obscure 19th-century property developer. Now called Levallois-Perret, this has long been an industrial area and features a shuttered Citroën factory. Georges Pierre Seurat painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte there in 1884. Like Joachim Neumann, after whom the Neanderthal species is named (as we saw in Chapter One), an accident of history linked Levallois, not to French car-making or Impressionist paintings, but to the Neanderthals’ tools.

  Excavations in Levallois-Perret by the River Seine in the late 19th century turned up fossils of extinct animals, such as northern species of rhinoceros and elephant, associated with a particular small, pointy type of stone tool. The great French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet argued in Le Préhistorique: origine et antiquité de l’homme (1883) that these were fundamentally different from the handaxes associated with Saint-Acheul, and he therefore distinguished between Acheulian and Levallois tool types.

  The Levallois technique of toolmaking has since come to denote the first of the so-called ‘prepared core’ technologies that marked the Lower–Middle Palaeolithic transition in Europe and the emergence of the Neanderthals. How does one make a Levallois tool, and why does it represent such an important cognitive leap forward? And how did the Levallois technique evolve from handaxe-making?

  There are two broad ways in which a knapper can organize the knapping process in order to make a cutting tool. The first is to create an end product, what would be traditionally called the tool, by knapping down a lump of rock, removing layer after layer of flakes. The second way is to knap flakes off the core and then work some of these flakes into the end products. In the first method the core is the intended tool, while in the second the core is simply a by-product of the knapping process, a lump of raw material from which useful flakes can be ‘mined’. ‘Levallois’ refers to a special kind of flake tool whose form is predetermined by several preceding steps.

  Flakes come in all shapes, sizes and forms and have varying degrees of complexity. Many of the stone tools we have already discussed were flake-based. For example, in Chapter Two we saw how Homo antecessor used simple flakes to make tools from 1.2 million to around 600,000 years ago at such sites as Atapuerca, Pakefield and Happisburgh. And in Chapter Three we saw evidence for flake-based Clactonian tools at such sites as Bilzingsleben and Vértesszöllös. Up to this point flake-based tools were less sophisticated than the core-based handaxe and could be made by inexperienced knappers. In Neanderthal Europe the Levallois revolution turned this equation on its head, and a more sophisticated type of flake-based tool industry came to dominate.

  The Levallois technique. The knapper strikes a Levallois flake off a Levallois core. In a series of steps preceding the one shown here the knapper prepared the Levallois core by removing flakes from the face of the core.

  Levallois flakes from Kokkinopilos, Greece. The flake on the right has the classic, tortoiselike back of a Levallois flake (lengths approx. 53 mm and 47 mm).

  A Levallois point (left) and core (right) from Kokkinopilos, Greece. The core was abandoned immediately after a Levallois point (not found at the site) had been struck from it. The roughly triangular depression in the middle of the face of the core is the negative scar left from the removal of the Levallois point (lengths approx. 46 mm and 60 mm).

  The handaxe was the first great core-based tool. To make one, the knapper removes several flakes from one face, then turns the core over and removes a series of flakes from the other face, and then back over and over again. The product is symmetrical, with two flat surfaces, much like an almond, only with a sharp edge. During manufacture the knapper is not only removing flakes from one face but is also setting the stage for the removal of flakes from the opposite side.

  The central innovation of the Levallois technique is that it introduced a degree of control and forward planning to making flake tools that had long existed in handaxe manufacture. In both the Levallois technique and handaxe manufacture, the knapper starts the same way, working down a core into a desired shape by reducing it from two sides alternately. And in both cases the knapper has to think ahead and use each flake removal to set the stage for what is to come further down the line. This is why many researchers believe that Levallois evolved organically from handaxe making. The difference in Levallois is that the two sides are not symmetrical, because only one side is the intended surface from which a predetermined flake of a desired shape and size is removed.

  It is easy to get lost in the technical definition of a Levallois flake. What is perhaps of greater importance is what is left behind. In handaxe manufacture, the core at the end of the knapping process is the intended tool. In the Levallois technique, the core is es
sentially a tool whose purpose is the manufacture of other tools – Levallois flakes. The ability to make tools was once considered definitive of what separates humans from other animals. Now that we know that other primates and even birds use tools, this notion has changed, and it is now commonly thought that humans are defined by the ability to make tools that are designed to produce other tools. This was the function of a Levallois core, and by this definition it makes Neanderthals as essentially human as Homo sapiens.

  The site of Cagny-la-Garenne is located in the Somme river valley, the same valley in northern France that includes some of the early handaxe sites such as Saint-Acheul and Abbeville, which contributed to the establishment of human antiquity. The area boasts a large amount of high-quality flint sources, and there was an extensive handaxe-making tradition here. It is exactly the kind of place where you might expect someone in prehistory to have started making a handaxe and then experiment by shifting to the manufacture of flake tools. In many cases such experimentation seems to be linked to a mistake where a handaxe was broken in the course of knapping. It is at Cagny-la-Garenne where the oldest Levallois flakes in Europe have been found, dating to over 400,000 years ago. Just as incipient Neanderthal traits are evident in the fossils at Sima de los Huesos at a similarly early date, we can see the beginnings of Levallois technology from that time, but only in a restricted area. It is only at around 250,000 years ago that all the trends – physical form, brain size, forward planning and the Levallois technique – come together and become widespread.

  Why did this new knapping method come to dominate Neanderthal Europe, replacing the handaxe in importance? What was its competitive advantage? In many cases it is possible to identify the sources of the stone that formed the raw materials for tools used at a site. We can therefore see how far away from the site the sources were located. We can see whether raw stone was brought back to the site and knapped there or whether it was knapped closer to the sources. We can also see whether tools made on certain materials were resharpened and reused extensively or were discarded after one or two rounds of use only.

  For Neanderthal sites like La Cotte, it has been documented that raw material from distant sources is of higher quality than that from nearby sources. In addition, it is clear that the stone tools from distant sources came to the sites already shaped into flakes or retouched tools and that they were reused more intensively than those made from materials from nearby sources. The Levallois technique allowed Neanderthals to travel further and with better stone tools than their predecessors. The archaeologist Steven Kuhn has built on this idea, seeing in Levallois tools the ability to pre-plan resource needs and match them to particular sites, indicating that the Neanderthals were efficient hunters and food gatherers.

  With Levallois tools the Neanderthals would have improved their chances of securing food, especially from migrating animals, and it would have allowed them to meet more groups, increasing their opportunities for finding sexual partners. Increased communication would also have facilitated the exchange of ideas and the consolidation of their technological advances. In sum, Levallois tools required a new level of forward planning to produce, and these tools had tremendous benefits over the handaxes and simple flakes that preceded them.

  Cagny-la-Garenne and other sites like it have demonstrated that Levallois is the earliest form of prepared core toolmaking. But there were others as well. One important one is blade production. It would be natural to assume that all stone tools with a cutting surface are blades, but this is in fact a technical term that refers to elongated flakes. Blades by definition have to be at least twice as long as they are wide and must have one or more ridges running parallel to their long edges. Other than the occasional lucky accident, blades can only be made with the prepared core technique.

  For many years blade production was considered to be a distinguishing characteristic of modern humans. But the current evidence is that the Neanderthals actually produced blades at a very early stage at sites on either side of the English Channel, just as the prepared core technique started to gain traction. The difference is that Homo sapiens developed the technology further, using more efficient production methods, and turned blades into the dominant lithic artifact of their times. Neanderthals, on the other hand, are known mainly for wider stone tools in a shape similar to the early Levallois flakes.

  While Germany has laid claim to type-sites for the species Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis, France’s contribution to archaeological nomenclature has been in stone tools: Acheulian, Levallois and Mousterian. This is in part because France was at the heart of the Neanderthal occupation of Europe, and they left many stone tools behind for French archaeologists to classify. Since the late 19th century and continuing today, the French are to lithic studies something akin to what they are to haute couture or haute cuisine.

  Neanderthal tools, whether made through Levallois or non-Levallois techniques, are known as Mousterian, after the site of Le Moustier in France. Le Moustier is a rock shelter in the Dordogne where a well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton was found in the early 20th century in association with tools. Thanks to this discovery, the Mousterian has long been almost synonymous with the Neanderthals, though it was later discovered that archaic Homo sapiens outside Europe also made Mousterian tools that are indistinguishable. In Chapter Five we will see how Neanderthals and early modern humans produced similar stone tools when the two populations arrived in Asia.

  In a curious postscript to the Le Moustier story, told by Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman in The Neandertals (1992), the original Le Moustier skeleton was well travelled after its excavation, having been sold to the Museum für Volkerkunde in Berlin and then taken to St Petersburg as war booty. A second Neanderthal skeleton from the site, this one an infant, was lost for many decades only to be rediscovered in the early 21st century in the collections of the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies.

  Mousterian flakes and points (which have a sharp tip) look surprisingly uniform across the vast geographical and chronological range covered by Neanderthals. Apart from some idiosyncratic, localized forms, and differences in raw materials, it would be hard to distinguish a Mousterian stone tool from, say, a 200,000-year-old site in France from one in Crimea from 50,000 years ago. Thanks in part to this uniformity, the Neanderthals have been charged with limited capacity for innovation.

  Under this superficial homogeneity, however, there is immense variability within the Mousterian, deriving from different ways of cutting up a core into flakes and blades. In other words, there were many ways that the Neanderthals could arrive at the same end product, and we can read patterns into which techniques were favoured at different times and places. The stone tool assemblages from some Mousterian sites contain one or several different variants of the Levallois and even other prepared core technologies. In other Mousterian sites there is little or no use of the Levallois. These sites are no less ‘Mousterian’ than those with high Levallois frequencies.

  Bordes versus Binford

  While much of the evidence for the cognitive advances of early Neanderthals comes from stone tools, it is ironic that many of the researchers who first analysed these tools did not give Neanderthals much credit for their capabilities. Yet these researchers coined many of the terms and pioneered the analytical techniques that still dominate Mousterian lithic studies.

  The French archaeologist François Bordes, one of the patriarchs of modern Palaeolithic archaeology, first brought the variability of Neanderthal tools into focus in the 1950s and 1960s. Bordes deliberately avoided saying much about Neanderthal cognitive abilities or social life. The epilogue of his book, A Tale of Two Caves (1972), an English-language semi-popular account of his decade-long work at two Mousterian caves, Pech de l’Azé and Combe-Grenal in the Dordogne, starts with these sentences: ‘Perhaps this tale of two caves has proved a disappointment to you. Perhaps it contained too much cold science and not enough about the human life of those remote times. But, unless I wi
sh to write a science fiction story, it is not possible to go further.’ Using the pseudonym Francis Carsac, Bordes was, in fact, also a prolific science fiction writer. In his 1955 novel Les Robinsons du Cosmos, for example, an entire French village is teleported to a faraway planet. Despite his reluctance to address directly the question of Neanderthal cognition, he clearly had low opinions of it.

  Stone tools: the basics

  There is an irony in comparing the small amount of time our predecessors spent in making stone tools with the endless hours Palaeolithic archaeologists (one of the authors of this book included) invest in measuring, drawing, recording and analysing them. The ancients at least got food and prestige for their efforts. What have we gained from ours? For those new to lithic analysis, we offer a brief introduction to the subdiscipline of archaeology that gives perhaps the best insight into the ways that Neanderthals thought.

  A Mousterian side scraper from Morfi, Greece (length approx. 93 mm).

  Stone tools are the most common type of artifact from Palaeolithic sites. Organic remains, such as animal bones, tools made of bone or antler, and seeds or other plant remains, are less likely to survive. Even rarer are human fossils, and tools or containers made of wood or reeds. Most archaeological sites have not yielded any fossils at all, whether human or animal.

  Knapping stone tools may look to the uninitiated like little more than banging rocks together. In fact it is a controlled and predictable process, governed by the laws of fracture mechanics. If you have ever been heartbroken yet intrigued by the way chips of glass break off an otherwise lovely crystal bowl or coffee table, you have the basic idea. One applies force to a lump of rock usually by hitting it with a stone cobble called a hammerstone. A crack will develop and spread from the point where the hammerstone strikes the rock. Given enough force, the rock fractures into two or more pieces.