The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  Also in The Clan of the Cave Bear film, there is a funeral scene in which Neanderthals decorate a corpse with a pile of flowers. As we discussed in Chapter Five, this comes from Ralph Solecki’s book Shanidar: The First Flower People (1971), about his excavation of Shanidar Cave which had ended ten years earlier. (Auel based several of her characters on particular Neanderthal skeletons unearthed at Shanidar.) Solecki believed that pollen in the soil associated with one of the Neanderthal skeletons at the site indicated a ritual burial with flowers. Since then archaeologists have suggested another more plausible way that the pollen came to that particular patch of dirt: rodents digging holes. Common sense dictates that the evidence of a bouquet of flowers on a burial would not last over 50,000 years, but this has not stopped the spread of the notion that Neanderthals had elaborate burial rituals. For a historian of science it is almost too easy to say that the 1960s counter-culture influenced Solecki’s interpretation.

  The Divje Babe I ‘flute’ was found in Slovenia and reconstructed from broken pieces, leading a small minority of researchers to believe that Neanderthals made musical instruments.

  At Divje Babe I we have a small, newish European country with a tenuous claim on the world’s oldest musical instrument. Despite evidence to the contrary, the notion that this bone is a flute has proven to be irresistible for the excavator, Ivan Turk; for Slovenia, whose Government Communication Office and National Museum promote Turk’s theory; and for musicologist Bob Fink, who has kept the debate going with his self-published The Origin of Music (2003). The bone, which was found in a cache of other bones with no associated Neanderthal artifacts, has between two and four holes depending on how one interprets the broken parts, and the question is whether these are random tooth marks or deliberate Neanderthal drill holes. Although this discovery is relatively recent (1996, compared to 1917 for the cave bear skulls of Drachenloch and 1960 for the alleged flowers of Shanidar), it has already penetrated the world of fictional Neanderthals in a way that reaches far beyond its extremely limited scholarly acceptance.

  In a possibly unrelated development, the National Museum of Wales commissioned a jazz musician to write a seventy-five-minute Neanderthal-inspired tune as background sound for its exhibition of Neanderthal teeth and handaxes. This composition went on tour around Wales in 2009, performed by singers and musicians playing admittedly fictional prehistoric stone instruments. After listening to a sample of this, we can say that it sounded like a cross between a church liturgy from a musically challenged distant country and a Beatles’ record played backwards. The US satirical TV comedy Family Guy poked fun at such ideas in 2005 when it depicted four Neanderthals in a cave inventing music, with their rhythmic grunts morphing into Billy Joel’s ‘The Longest Time’.

  In addition to the popular but unsupported ideas of a Neanderthal cave bear cult, Neanderthal flower children and Neanderthal musicians, the other persistent idea in Neanderthal fiction is that of telepathy. This seems to have arisen from the fact that Neanderthal brains were on average as large as ours. The reasoning goes that if their brains were less powerful in some ways then they must have been more powerful in other ways, to account for all that Neanderthal grey matter.

  Telepathy also dovetailed nicely with the outdated theory that Neanderthals were unable to speak, because it gave them another way of communicating. In the movie version of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the Neanderthals rely on sign language where their vocal range lets them down, but in the book this is done more with shared thinking. A Neanderthal skeleton discovered at Kebara Cave in Israel in 1983 points to strong similarities between Neanderthal and modern human hyoid bones, which help govern speech; this suggests that Neanderthals could produce a range of sounds similar to ours. And we also know from Robin Dunbar’s theory of group size and the evidence that Neanderthals had the same FOXP2 gene for speech as we do, that Neanderthals almost certainly had spoken language, although it is debatable whether their speech was as complex as ours.

  Dressing up

  In 1939 the US anthropologist Carleton Coon published The Races of Europe, in which he included an illustration of a Neanderthal wearing a typical 20th-century business suit and hat. While this is often cited as the root of the they-were-just-like-us school of thought, a less well-appreciated consequence is that it inspired people to test the notion that Neanderthals could walk unnoticed among us, as long as they had the right clothes. There is an unmistakable trend of people dressing up as Neanderthals (and dressing up as Neanderthals dressing up as modern humans) that shows no sign of abating.

  Every time a new museum opens with Neanderthal material, you can count on an actor showing up wearing animal skins and some sort of facial prosthetic. And TV documentaries on human evolution typically bring the past to life with the help of people demonstrating how Neanderthals might have behaved. Then there are the movies and, what is most familiar to an American television audience, the GEICO commercials. It is hard not to think of how the Neanderthals would have laughed if they saw our species’s persistent attempts to impersonate them.

  The archetypal ‘Neanderthal-in-a-suit’ drawing – Carleton Coon’s illustration of 1939 – testing the question of whether a Neanderthal in contemporary garb could pass unnoticed in modern society. With Hollywood-style make-up, we are getting closer to an answer (see p. 144, above).

  One of the rhetorical points that Coon was making with the Neanderthal-in-a-suit drawing was that it was the polar opposite of earlier reconstructions that were based on the skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints. For decades Marcellin Boule’s mistaken interpretation of this skeleton precluded the possibility that Neanderthals could walk unnoticed among us. The implications were that we could not have descended from them, and our ancestors would certainly not have been interested in any sexual liaisons. For this is really the subtext whenever we dress up like Neanderthals – it’s a way of exploring the question of whether the Neanderthals are them or us, and whether it’s conceivable that we would find them sexually attractive (which is essentially the biological definition of distinguishing them and us).

  Coon effectively re-opened this question with his illustration, and in all sorts of guises we still seem to be trying to answer it. In a BBC documentary called British Isles: A Natural History (2005), celebrity British gardening heartthrob Alan Titchmarsh donned Hollywood-style facial make-up and prosthetics to see if anyone would notice him walking down London’s Oxford Street as a Neanderthal. The experiment was somewhat undone by the depth of English reserve, or just plain indifference. But the cameras managed to capture people stealing sideways glances in Titchmarsh’s direction, from which we can conclude that Neanderthals would indeed stand out if they tried to blend in here.

  Around the turn of the millennium British television seemed to go through a Neanderthal period, with the Titchmarsh experiment only one of a number of instances when people dressed up as Neanderthals for the cameras. The main drivers for this Neanderthal mania seem to be the advent of realistic computer animation, improvements in make-up artistry and new discoveries and theories. The BBC’s Walking with Cavemen (2003; broadcast on the Discovery Channel in the USA), in which the Neanderthals appear in the eighth and final episode, was a logical sequel to the super-successful Walking with Dinosaurs (1999); it relied heavily on computer animation. As our forerunner species edged closer to the present, however, the hi-tech computer realism faded and the viewer was left with another instance of people dressing up as Neanderthals. Channel 4’s Neanderthal (2000) also used animation in parts, notably in an impressive scene with a herd of woolly mammoths, but it was primarily about actors using make-up. In the USA the History Channel’s Clash of the Cavemen (2008) was basically an updated version of the Channel 4 series.

  Watching documentaries that feature actors-in-a-Neanderthal-suit it is difficult to maintain a suspension of disbelief, which is perhaps why the light-hearted car insurance commercials and museum opening parties seem to be more effective. The best way to try to imagine the
world of the Neanderthals, we believe, is not through TV shows or caveman movies, but by visiting their archaeological sites.

  Neanderthal tourism

  We are living in a golden age of Neanderthal tourism. In recent years new museums have sprung up at key sites and pioneering techniques have given us increasingly realistic reconstructions. The Neanderthals seem to inhabit a fertile zone at the intersection of the forces of regional development, science education and exciting new research.

  Many of the major sites are now accessible to visitors, either through visitor centres or nearby museums: La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Le Moustier in France, Atapuerca in Spain, Krapina in Croatia, the Neander Valley in Germany and the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

  In the Dordogne region of south-west France the Neanderthals are part of a more general package of Palaeolithic tourism, which includes much of the world’s oldest and most impressive cave art. Les Eyzies promotes itself as the ‘Capital of the Prehistoric World’ and features an enormous statue of a stylized Neanderthal overlooking the valley below the cliffside settlement. It also opened a National Museum of Prehistory in 2004. While much of the attraction of Les Eyzies is from artistic artifacts produced by Stone Age modern humans, the town includes the site of Le Moustier, after which Mousterian stone tools were named. A few kilometres away is the Tursac Prehisto Parc, which features reconstructions of Neanderthals engaging with all manner of Ice Age beasts, and La Roque Saint-Christophe, which has similar reconstructions and is also an impressively large archaeological site.

  A ‘reconstructed’ Neanderthal meets a young modern human at the Neanderthal Museum in Metmann, Germany.

  One of the most exciting developments is also perhaps the one longest overdue. In 1996 the Neanderthal Museum opened in Mettmann, Germany, in the Neander Valley near the grotto where the earliest Neanderthal fossils to be recognized as a separate species were found. The award-winning building is home to multimedia exhibits, reconstructions, original artifacts and hands-on workshops. In the years following the museum’s opening, archaeologists Ralf Schmitz and Jurgen Thissen returned to this most famous of Neanderthal sites and, astonishingly, found additional pieces of bone which fitted on to the original Neanderthal individual.

  For those who prefer to visit the Neanderthals in cities, rather than travelling out to the sites where their remains were discovered, there are some excellent opportunities. In 2007 the American Museum of Natural History in New York opened the Hall of Human Origins, which features eerily realistic reconstructions by the Fossil Hominid Reconstruction and Research Team, led by Gary Sawyer and Viktor Deak. The team recreated ancient faces by building up from the skull, using clay for soft tissue and lifelike urethane plastic for the skin. The Neanderthal Campsite diorama shows a complete scene that emphasizes Neanderthals’ modern behaviours. We have since purchased our own Neanderthal sculpture kit from the museum, so we can try reconstructing Neanderthals at home.

  In 2010 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. opened its own Hall of Human Origins with reconstructions by John Gurche, a self-described ‘paleo-artist’. It is a positive development that artists such as Sawyer, Deak and Gurche are becoming as well known as their creations. To make the point that Neanderthals are the most human of extinct hominins, Gurche gave his reconstructed Neanderthals stylish long hair, sometimes pinned samurai-style at the top of the head, sometimes with blond locks flowing around the ears like legendary rock musician Gregg Allman.

  Bits of Neanderthal anatomy can be found in museums throughout Europe. The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, for example, boasts the oldest human remains in the principality in the form of nineteen Neanderthal teeth from Pontnewydd Cave, dating to 230,000 years ago. The Regional Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany (near Leipzig), promotes itself as Germany’s oldest archaeological museum, dating to 1910. It contains the remains from Bilzingsleben along with a fine reconstruction by Paris-based artist Elisabeth Daynès of a Neanderthal posed as The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. Recent permanent galleries on the Palaeolithic make it an important stop on any tour of Neanderthal Europe. The Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium, has material from Spy, which was one of the major sites from the 19th century. There are surely others we have missed.

  Perhaps ‘tourism’ is the word that best captures the modern experience of the Neanderthals. We feel better informed when we seek them out in museums, both in major cities and at the archaeological sites. We gape at reconstructions, trying to imagine what it would be like to meet a real Neanderthal. We laugh at their appearance in cartoons, on TV and in movies. We have grooved to the song ‘Neanderthal Man’ by Hotlegs. We enjoy interacting with actors in Neanderthal garb, much as we would if they dressed as pirates, gladiators or vampires.

  What we lack, however, is something more solemn. One behaviour that defines our humanity is the ability to mourn. Our treatment of the dead is a testament to our belief that life is more than animated matter, that our significance transcends our corporeal forms. With the Neanderthals, we do not simply have the remains of a few hundred long-deceased individuals languishing in museums, rather we have the memory of a whole species, one that lived for a few hundred thousand years, and with whom we shared a common ancestor perhaps 600,000 years ago.

  There is little solace in the revelation that, at least for those of us whose ancestors left Africa long ago, our DNA may hold some small trace of the Neanderthals. This kind of Neanderthal survival, if you can call it that, is invisible. What prevents us from truly missing them, from mourning their absence? Perhaps it is the distance of time. Perhaps it is their not-quite-like-us appearance.

  With this book we hope we have at least taken a step towards unlocking our human feelings about our extinct cousins. By reviewing the amazing trove of knowledge that has built up in recent years, and contrasting that with the comical place they have in our popular culture, we can start to remember them for what they were and what they accomplished, rather than seeing them only through the lens of our own insecurities.

  Bibliography

  For the general reader

  Arsuaga, Juan Luis. The Neanderthal’s Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers. Trans. Andy Klatt. Chichester: Wiley, 2003.

  Arsuaga, Juan Luis, and Ignacio Martínez. The Chosen Species: The Long March of Human Evolution. Trans. Rachel Gomme. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 [1998].

  Bordes, François. A Tale of Two Caves. New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972.

  Dunbar, Robin. The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.

  Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

  Finlayson, Clive. The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  Gamble, Clive. Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization. Stroud: Alan Sutton; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

  Jordan, Paul. Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

  Moser, Stephanie. Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

  Pääbo, Svante. Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

  Pitts, Michael W., and Mark Roberts. Fairweather Eden: Life in Britain Half a Million Years Ago as Revealed by the Excavations at Boxgrove. London: Century, 1997.

  Sawyer, G. J., Victor Deak, Esteban Sarmiento and Richard Milner. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

  Schrenk, Friedemann, and Stephanie Müller. The Neanderthals. Trans. Phyllis G. Jestice. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

  Shackley, Myra. Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983; Wildmen: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma. L
ondon: Thames & Hudson, 1983.

  Shreeve, James. The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mysteries of Modern Human Origins. New York: Avon Books, 1995.

  Stringer, Chris. Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

  Stringer, Chris. The Origin of Our Species. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

  Stringer, Chris, and Peter Andrews. The Complete World of Human Evolution. Revised edition. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011.

  Stringer, Chris, and Clive Gamble. In Search of the Neanderthals: Solving the Puzzle of Human Origins. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993.

  Tattersall, Ian. The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives. Revised edition. New York: Westview Press, 1999.

  Tattersall, Ian. Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

  Taylor, Timothy. The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

  Trinkaus, Eric, and Pat Shipman. The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind. New York: Knopf, 1992.

  Wynn, Thomas, and Frederick L. Coolidge. How to Think Like a Neandertal. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  For the specialist reader: books

  Andrefsky, William, Jr. Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998.