Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

The bigger picture too is hard to grasp, having transformed drastically since 1856, when odd fossils1 from a German quarry were tentatively seen as a vanished species of human. Scholars began digging for more of these strange beings, and by the First World War, growing numbers of Neanderthal bones made it clear earth had birthed many siblings alongside us.

The rest of these pages will paint a twenty-first-century portrait of the Neanderthals: not dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree, but enormously adaptable and even successful ancient relatives. You’re reading this book because you care about them, and the greatest, grandest questions they pose: who we are, where we come from and where we might be going.

Lascaux’s leaping bulls are closer in time to the photos on your phone than to the panels of horses and lions at Chauvet. Where do the Neanderthals fit in? They take us way back beyond fingers tracing beasts on stone walls.

they became a distinct population 450 to 400 thousand years ago (ka).

In total, the Neanderthals endured for an astonishing 350,000 years, until we lose sight of them – or, at least their fossils and artefacts – somewhere around 40 ka.

So far, so dizzying. But it’s not just time: Neanderthals also spread across a remarkably vast swathe of space. More Eurasian than European, they lived from north Wales across to the borders of China, and southwards to the fringes of Arabia’s deserts.

Neumann – and Neander – literally mean ‘new man’. Could there be any more fitting moniker for the place where we first discovered another kind of human?

the Forbes skull had very likely been in the hands of Charles Darwin, conveyed by a palaeontologist colleague of Busk

But it was another two decades until mostly complete skeletons were found. Again in Belgium, remains of two adults came in 1886 from the Betche-aux-Rotches Cave at Spy, showing that flat, long skulls, sloped-back jaws and robust limbs previously known from other sites all belonged to the same creatures.

Hugh Falconer, who would bring the Forbes skull to Darwin. Like Busk, he remains little known today, but was central to the origins of human evolution as a science.

The brain processing this sentence had ballooned almost to its current size by 500 ka, and was shared by the Neanderthals.

Figure 1 Neanderthals’ evolutionary context as a member of the hominin family.

our family tree is more crowded than scholars like Busk or Darwin ever imagined: there are over 20 identified hominin species from just the last 3.5 million years. Its roots go deeper too. Transforming small scuttling mammals into hominins and eventually Neanderthals took an extraordinarily long time. Immense forests 25 Ma bristled with monkeys as the split leading to the apes was already underway.

And someone by 3.3 Ma was responsible for the Lomekwian: the simplest stone artefacts. This is probably the beginning of an intensifying feedback cycle between meat and lithics: casual carnivore tendencies likely went back much earlier, but sharp cutting edges are essential for accessing most of the flesh and fat on large carcasses.

Traces of soft bodies so deep in the past are incredibly rare, and their immediacy is in contrast to the dry fossils with which researchers must try to define ancestry for Neanderthals. Genetics tells us they emerged as a lineage around 700 ka, and though the Gran Dolina people lived only around 100,000 years prior to this, they don’t look very alike. It’s possible that more than one sort of hominin lived in Europe at this point, but many bones over the next few hundred millennia somewhat resemble contemporary fossils from Africa, including a massive lower jaw found in Germany in 1907 that was named H. heidelbergensis. While these hominins were long claimed as likely predecessors to Neanderthals, more recent work at a third Atapuerca locale, the Sima de los Huesos, has refined the picture. How the 28-odd hominins – many in exceptional condition – ended up deep inside the ‘Pit of Bones’ here is something of a mystery.

The ‘hobbits’ of Flores, Indonesia, are one case, perhaps going back as far as 700 ka and surviving until around 50 ka.

But among all the recent human evolution discoveries, perhaps the most startling for understanding the Neanderthals is that they could and did interbreed with us.

taphonomy, today recognised as the most important part of archaeology.

It turns out that their apparently bigger brains are actually due to sex-biased samples: when only males are compared, the difference is much less, highlighting the probability that most complete Neanderthal skeletons belong to men.

200 and 300 individuals. The majority comprise the odd bone or jaw fragment with teeth valiantly holding on, but between 30 to 40 are much more complete skeletons, and must have originally entered the dirt whole.

Stand face to face with a Neanderthal, and they’d be recognisable as a kind of human, but decidedly unconventional. Somewhat shorter than average, with broader chests and wider waists, their limb proportions were also slightly different. Beneath massively muscled thighs were thicker, rounder and slightly curved leg bones; nonetheless, unlike countless inaccurate reconstructions, they absolutely walked as upright as us.

Neanderthal skulls are shaped very differently. Lower crowns gave them a more aerodynamic, sculpted look, finished by an obvious bump just above the neck.

Larger and deeper-set eyes gazed out from a face whose nose and mouth seemed pulled forwards, but with swept-back cheekbones. Framing all this were magnificent arched brow ridges; not centrally separated like your brows, and much more imposing.

Scientific pilgrims began arriving to study this famous relic, and 99 years after its original discovery, the first definitive study of Le Moustier 1 was finally published. Probably a boy aged between 11 and 15 years of age, he’s the most complete adolescent Neanderthal known.

Northerly animals do tend to have bigger eyes, and on average, even people from higher latitudes have eyeballs up to 20 per cent bigger than those from near the equator.

Similar to our own evolutionary history, very dark-skinned Neanderthals are unlikely, because even with continuous sun exposure, getting enough vitamin D at the higher latitudes they lived in would be impossible.

What those cavernous nostrils could do, however, was control air flow, allowing Neanderthals to snort in air at almost twice the rate we can.

Europeans tending to be stockier and have thicker bone shafts than those of African backgrounds.

DNA testing (which has yet to be done on any Neanderthals from the Near East),

To add to the impression that some tasks tended to be done by one sex more than another, Neanderthal women have a higher frequency of chipping damage on their lower front teeth, while in men it’s on the upper set.

Shanidar 1 is the most battered Neanderthal known, but he’s far from alone in having endured more than one physical complaint.

On balance, we may actually come out as more violent than Neanderthals, because nowhere is there evidence they killed youngsters. That’s not the case at the early H. sapiens site of Balzi Rossi, north-west Italy, where a child very probably perished after being stabbed or shot in the back. A stone tool fragment was still lodged in one vertebra, and while it’s possibly some kind of horrific accident, the weight points towards social conflict. Such aggression in our own species, even between hunter-gatherers, is certainly well documented, and clearly accelerated over the past 40,000 years. In contrast, we see no such phenomenon through the hundreds of millennia Neanderthals existed.

Two Neanderthal infants born probably 30,000 years and thousands of kilometres apart – Le Moustier 2 in France and Mezmaiskaya 1 in Russia – shared distinctively thick bones. But in other ways, such as arm proportions, they were slightly dissimilar. And even Neanderthals who lived in the same areas at roughly similar times were far from clones.

Northern European Neanderthals’ faces stuck out a bit more, giving them larger gaps behind the back teeth.

As ancient genetics develops further, mechanisms and adaptations behind Neanderthals’ unique biology will become clearer. But perhaps the biggest revolution has been the toppling of ‘ice age’ explanations for why they looked and lived how they did. Their bodies were honed for and by hugely demanding lifestyles, whether or not they hunched against glacial winds. Living through extreme cold climates may have simply buffed up the already sleek engine they ran on. And when we fully survey the vast swathe of climates and environments that Neanderthals experienced, their story becomes even more unexpected.

Figure 3 Palaeoclimate during the time of the Neanderthals, including glacial periods and the Eemian; a world 2–4°C warmer than today.

Neanderthals actually lived through more interglacials than glacials.

All this means that we can reconstruct in quite outstanding detail the conditions in which Neanderthals lived at any point in time, and also what the world was like when they disappeared. This falls around 40 ka in MIS 3, meaning its climate and environments have come under special scrutiny. Despite being classed as an interglacial in its own right, it’s really more like an extended warm phase between around 65 and 30 ka, during a longer period of generally colder conditions starting in MIS 4 until the end of MIS 2.

Deciduous forests are surprisingly difficult places in which to be a hunter-gatherer, since much of the plant stuff that’s edible takes time and energy to make it so. Easily foraged things like nuts and berries tend to be seasonal. Large game was around, but far harder to find in forests.

Current more nuanced understanding of Pleistocene climate and environment certainly casts the ‘hyper-arctic’ explanations for Neanderthals’ anatomy in an even less certain light.

Hmm

Stone tools were the atoms of Neanderthal life. They connected every aspect of their world, and are the fundamental units with which archaeologists try to reconstruct their cultures. Known to researchers as ‘lithics’, each possesses a unique story arcing from rocky formation to the day a Neanderthal picked it up, and onwards to rediscovery with the scrape of a trowel.

First, Discoid technology was specialised, yet somewhat disposable: the flakes weren’t intended to last long and be transported elsewhere. Second, this kind of techno-complex would only have suited Neanderthals who knew the rock resources extremely well, and weren’t regularly moving long distances. The third key techno-complex made by Western European Neanderthals was the Quina.

Later, they also began to experiment with true blade – or laminar – technology: defined by products twice as long as they are wide.

This flowering of technological diversity from about 150 ka onwards didn’t happen in the same way everywhere. Neanderthals in other regions were doing different things at different times. While the caves of south-west France got the lion’s share of research historically, spreads of lithics across the plains of northern France were harder to understand.

A distinct ‘biface divide’ splits Europe down the middle, with the west as a Mousterian world, where bifaces followed ancient traditions. Broadly symmetric, they have sharp perimeters flaked all – or most – of the way round. In contrast, Neanderthals in central-eastern Europe developed a very different way of doing bifaces. Known collectively as the ‘Keilmesserüppen’, they’re defined by asymmetry, with one bifacial sharp edge opposite a natural or artificially blunted margin.

There is one techno-complex that is quite restricted geographically, shows a strong climatic correlation and is never found with any other core technology: the Quina. This could therefore represent a particular way of Neanderthal life, and we’ll explore this further in Chapter 10.

Over 99 per cent of all artefacts from the Middle Palaeolithic are stone.

Today wood, bone and shell are central to new perspectives on Neanderthals as technical artisans in substances other than stone. What it tells us about their behaviour has in many cases been revelatory.

Schöningen turned out to contain one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century. From the dense black and grey silts of Locality 13 II-4 came proof that the apparently outlandish claims about Neanderthal weapons were true. Alongside dozens of butchered horses lay scattered the instruments of their demise: elegant, finely tapered wooden spears.

In north-east Spain is an enormous rockshelter known as Abric Romaní, which has produced some of the most important data on Neanderthals in the past three decades. When excavations began in 1909 there was little indication that an astonishing archive lay concealed beneath its attractive yet ordinary travertine overhang. In fact, it’s the same calcium carbonate waters which formed the overhang that make this place special: layers of flowstone were repeatedly deposited across the floor of the rockshelter. Each covered the detritus from Neanderthal occupations, conserving it in breathtaking detail.