Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Neanderthals were indisputably carpenters, but they also pioneered composite tools.

What all the shell sites have in common is local scarcity of high-quality rock, with Neanderthals forced to use poorer stuff, including very small beach pebbles.

One riddle remains: why are shell-knapping sites not found outside the central Mediterranean? Smooth clams today are abundant farther west and right around the Atlantic coast, though perhaps less so in glacial periods. Nevertheless, the absence of shell tools in Iberia is odd, given that Neanderthals were certainly foraging on seashores,

about 75 per cent of all the bone tools are from the horses’ left side is remarkable. It may be something to do with how grip and gesture work better for right-handers using left-side bones, but what’s important is that this was an intentional choice.

While individual retouchers were more intensively used in some techno-complexes, especially Quina, there’s no obvious explanation for why some sites have huge numbers but others hardly any. Local quality or availability of stone doesn’t seem related, and nor does the number of retouched lithics, age of the site, its function or the animals hunted. The answer may be that these retouchers were tied to contexts and dynamics that are archaeologically elusive, such as the site’s place within a wider occupation cycle, or the social make-up of group members.

Did Neanderthals also make weapons from bone? Maybe. Some of the best candidates come from Salzgitter-Lebenstedt, Germany, a rich open-air reindeer kill site dating to at least 55 to 45 ka. There are more than 20 shaped bone artefacts here, including mammoth ribs flattened into points around 0.5m (1.5ft) long.

Salzgitter remains the only candidate for Middle Palaeolithic bone weapons.

directed instruction is common to all living humans. Combined teaching by showing as well as telling is the most effective, and young Neanderthals likely learned not in a formal way, but by cultural and bodily immersion. They would have heard how a cobble with good structure calls out when struck; felt with their body the right angle and force to hit a core just so.

Deep knowledge underlay discerning material choices and targeted planning. As connoisseurs of the crafts they were immersed in every day, Neanderthals combined convention with adaptability. They invented new ways to take things apart and join them together.

And as brains are greedy organs, even slightly larger ones cost more calories. In total, we’re talking a whopping 3,500 to 5,000kcal every day.

To feed a group of 10 Neanderthals for a week, you’re looking at 300,000kcal. Three reindeer every seven days would hit that target, but it’s almost 50 per cent more than managed by typical wolf packs.

It was carnivores squabbling over Neanderthals’ refuse, not the other way round.

The extinct horses at Schöningen weighed well over 500kg (1,100lb);

some Neanderthals, including those at Spy, appear to have been getting between 20 and 50 per cent of their animal protein from mammoth.

A particularly dramatic site like this is Mauran, on the edge of the French Pyrenees, where there are probably remains from several thousand hunted bison.11 There are just a handful of bones from other species, but the bison are mostly females and younger calves, suggesting that Neanderthals could have been targeting them during summer when they shifted from plains to uplands. Most interesting, although this context might have involved herd drives, the butchery itself at Mauran was definitely selective.

Catching birds has long been believed an advanced hunting technique, so how did Neanderthals do it?

we have no evidence of nets. Similarly, nobody has ever found preserved darts or bows, but the small bone point from Salzgitter and the tiny Levallois points or even bladelets from a number of other locales must have been hafted and could have formed part of small projectiles.15

Among them is Bajondillo, a rockshelter in the southern Spanish city of Torremolinos. Here in layers dating between 170 and 140 ka there’s well over 1,000 broken-up mollusc remains, almost all mussels. Direct heat forces these creatures to open their shells, and since many were charred only on the exterior, it seems Neanderthals knew this trick.

Many of the large mammals hunted by Neanderthals would have had warble fly larvae under their pelts.

Systematic hunting was also happening at Taubach, where Neanderthals not only ambushed rhino but at least 50 bears, probably more.20

A truly twenty-first-century development in calculus analysis has been using DNA to try and identify foods, though as a technique it’s still teething. Among the scores of bacterial or viral matches, a few intriguing results came back. The individual from Spy with meaty-looking wear on her teeth had calculus DNA that matched rhino as well as wild sheep; seeing as sheep aren’t really represented in the faunal assemblage, could this be food eaten before arriving at Spy?

Certainly someone at the El Salt rockshelter in Spain was eating plants, since hearth sediments have furnished us with the first Neanderthal faeces samples.

there’s good evidence for some level of meat cooking.

Kiviaq is more complex: a Greenlandic method where hundreds of little auks (tiny seabirds) are sewn inside a fat-smeared seal skin and stored for months until soft and green-tinged. Vegetable fermentation is also common, whether sauerkraut, kimchee or fermented tofu.

Taste, though, doesn’t just signal what’s good. Bitter sensations especially warn of danger, and genetics confirms that Neanderthals could detect one such compound. Known as PTC,32 it’s found in some plants and is safe only when consumed in small amounts. Intriguingly, this Neanderthal mutation is different to that in many people today and was accompanied by another partially blocking PTC signals. This may mean Neanderthals had a higher tolerance for such flavours, and combined with genetic evidence for a wider array of bitter and sour taste perceptions, sampling unfamiliar plants or fermented meats might have been safer for them. The duo of taste and smell combine to produce what we experience as flavour, so it’s even possible that Neanderthals lived in a richer culinary world than ours.

Certainly in many hunter-gatherer societies mostly male hunters deal with large game, sometimes leaving for days.

The ‘Rosetta Stone’ for deciphering the wider archaeological record of the Neanderthals has always been finding single episodes of action or presence, ideally lasting just a few days, or even minutes. Individual refitted groups of lithics of course represent very short timescales, but finding a whole layer at the same temporal resolution is almost unheard of. Yet thanks to twenty-first-century excavation methods, we know they do exist.

Fire is one of the most potent symbols in the grand story of human evolution.

hearths also structured Neanderthal existence:

Although technically edible, burning leafy branches would certainly have boosted the hearth’s smokiness: perfect for curing hides.

one of the biggest uncertainties in our knowledge of Neanderthals is the size of groups they lived in, and multiple synchronous hearths implies larger groups.

what did Neanderthals do with waste from their own bodies? The hominin dung in a hearth at El Salt has already been mentioned, and researchers took excavation here to a Lilliputian scale.

For all the spectacular, intimate details we have about individual sites, Neanderthals were fundamentally nomadic.

The archaeological record shows that wherever they lived, Neanderthals were focused on hunting large beasts, even if they also took small game, seafood and plants when possible. This means that whether they stalked cool steppe-tundra or warm forests, moving multiple times each year was still necessary. But the diversity of the environments means we should expect the frequency and distance to vary.

Personal travel gear is selected based on multiple factors: the expected activities, the amount of travelling and, crucially, what kind of stone would be available en route.

Neanderthals possessing detailed knowledge of geological resources, and thinking ahead. They knew the places with bad rock that were worth bringing good cores to, and conversely, those with nearby, decent stone with which to restock.

Range size isn’t just about land, but about people. If Neanderthals lived in small areas – maybe just across a couple of valleys – then they’d rarely meet other groups. Moreover, without large territories and extended social relations, it was theorised that Neanderthals wouldn’t need material expressions of shared cultural values, which can help maintain networks.

While Neanderthal bones bear witness to extremely physical lives, and they were probably more efficient striders than us, long-distance running was not a forte. Factoring that in together with shorter legs making them up to 10 per cent slower and the impact of realistic terrain, a day’s trek drops well below 100km (60mi.).

Giving and receiving objects or resources like food is a crucial way humans of all stripes maintain relationships. For hunter-gatherers living in small populations who don’t meet often, it’s especially important.

some Neanderthals were genetically isolated,

Total population estimates tend to be in tens of thousands or even less. At any point in time there may have been fewer Neanderthals walking about than commuters passing each day through Clapham Junction, London’s busiest train station. Can we say anything about how groups were organised, beyond the fact they sometimes seem to have separated into smaller units?

despite being very sparsely scattered across the land,5 not all Neanderthals were genetically inbred, and so the question is how they maintained DNA diversity.

A growing range of bio-geochemical methods can track the movements of individual Neanderthals using stable isotopes.

by comparing the values in teeth to the geology where they were found, it’s possible to see movement from different geological areas, sometimes with dramatic results, such as the Bronze Age person buried near Stonehenge who’d grown up in the Alps.

Huge ecological productivity in the tropics means people can get what they need from smaller areas of land, but the ranges for Neanderthals in higher latitudes were more likely towards the upper end.

there’s plenty of other evidence that they were accomplished hide workers.

What makes the production of clothing especially likely beyond Neanderthals’ physiology is the multiple lines of evidence for massive processing to soften and stretch hides, notably seen in their clamping and probably also chewing tooth wear.

‘the Quina’

Le Rozel, which in total has over 250 prints through several layers. Some are short step-by-step trails, but mostly they’re isolated prints. The smallest feet – those of a toddler – left the lightest trace, and there’s even a perfect handprint: fingers spread wide, pressed into the sand, as if raised in greeting through 80,000

oldest known Neanderthal prints were left more than 250,000 years before those at Le Rozel. On the slopes of the extinct Roccamonfina volcano, southern Italy, they were believed to be the Devil’s tracks after being revealed by eighteenth-century landslides.