Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Neanderthals evolved with 30,000 generations of hunting heritage already behind them. Tracking may have developed nearly 1.5 million years ago, as footprints from Ileret, Kenya, show early hominins stalking the muddy margins of a lake where both trails and their makers could be watched and ambushed.

the Lykov family who fled from religious persecution into the Russian taiga in 1936. They survived undisturbed over 240km (150mi.) from the nearest settlement for 40 years, and a vital supplement to their marginal farming was hunting. But they had no weapons, and the Lykov boys taught themselves to simply chase animals through the forest until they dropped. The Lykovs were rarely successful, sometimes making just one kill a year, whereas Neanderthals had had lifetimes to hone their skills.

they were top-level hunters and canny foragers.

pioneered new ways of using organic materials.

Neanderthals were also the first to truly begin stretching their lives through time and space in a way no earthly creature had ever experienced. They disintegrated stone and animals’ bodies in more complicated, systematic ways and moved the pieces farther than ever before, and even the shift in retouchers from entire bones to shards mirrors this

growing intensity.

Then the real revelation came: a large series of dates using the uranium-series method1 showed unequivocally that this subterranean structure was made over 174,000 years ago. Instantly, Bruniquel became one of the most important Neanderthal sites ever found.

Whether Neanderthals had any kind of language is, of course, one of the most enduring questions about them.

Despite being less bulbous, the average capacity of their skulls was a bit greater. That means more neurons: the connective plumbing between different areas. But it’s about more than bulk.

Neanderthals’ flatter foreheads had less room for the frontal cortex area, intimately connected to complex thought processes like memory and language. And they also had smaller cerebelli, another area involved in concentration, communication and language. In living people, reduced cerebelli does seem to indicate poorer skills, and in Neanderthals the connections to other language-related zones were also smaller.

today it appears that Neanderthal throats could make pretty much the same range of sounds as ours. There were perhaps some subtle differences in vowels including ‘ah’, but their breath control wasn’t appreciably poorer, giving them the ability to utter lengthy sound combinations.

Taking everything on balance, it’s very likely Neanderthals spoke in some form, but about what?

Astonishingly, we know that already between 250 and 200 ka Neanderthals were making liquid red ochre. Minute analysis of red-stained sediments from the open-air locale of Maastricht-Belvédère, Netherlands, showed they were ochre splashes. The nearest source was between 40 and 80km (25 and 50mi.) away,

Maastricht-Belvédère is the oldest knownuse of pigment.

example was revealed by photographic processing, and when adjacent calcite samples were dated, the oldest came out at more than 54,000 years old. While the Königsaue birch tar and the Le Rozel sands bear accidental prints, if genuine this would be the first intentional image of a Neanderthal hand; a spine-tingling thought.

What Neanderthals do have in common with early H. sapiens prior to 45 ka is an absence of any unequivocal representational art, manifested by carvings or breath-taking creatures running across stone ceilings. The oldest known image of an animal was painted before 44 ka in Sulawesi, Indonesia; there are also handprints around the same age from Lubang Jeriji Saléh, Borneo, and around 41 ka a tiny woman sculpted in ivory was left at Vogelherd,

Once they came blinking into the world, Neanderthal babies would have been extraordinarily like ours. Their developmental milestones were almost identical, going from helpless curled-up creatures to rambunctious toddlers within a year. They would have looked just as cute too, a vital feature ensuring parental affection over their similarly extended childhoods. Much is made of whether they grew faster or not, but in comparison to other primates, the difference is negligible and youngsters would’ve been totally dependent for many years.

few really beat-up Neanderthals are hard to explain without something like this. The dreadful head injury suffered by the Saint-Césaire woman would probably have caused confusion and certainly massive blood loss, and she must have been helped at least temporarily. Similarly, Shanidar 3 might have been lucky and avoided a collapsed lung after their chest was stabbed, but they may have struggled with breathing and walking. They hung on for more than two weeks before death, and given the increased calorie needs of Neanderthal bodies, this seems a long time to survive if nobody was bringing them food. But it’s Shanidar 1 who is the most convincing case for long-term support. Probably partially blind, certainly deaf in at least one ear, with hugely reduced mobility and a chopped-off arm, he nevertheless endured to a ripe old age, even adding arthritis to his aches and pains.

Although there were likely never hordes of hoary old ones, just as in recent hunter-gatherer societies three living generations was probably normal for Neanderthals. And growing up with grandparents matters, for two key reasons. First, casual babysitting is extremely useful, as it frees adults to find more food or do other tasks. Second, in addition to reinforcing what children learn from parents, grandparents are more likely to be competent in complex skills, whether producing hafting recipes, tracking or even medical care.

Bits of at least one Neanderthal adult and a teenager are among thousands of reindeer bones at Salzgitter-Lebenstedt, perhaps hunting casualties. In some cases Neanderthals were the prey, or at least a carnivore’s meal. On the finger bones of a child found at Ciemna, Poland, distinctive damage from the digestive juices of a large raptor are visible.

Kebara 2 is a largely complete Neanderthal’s upper body from Israel; look closely and you can see how small finger and wrist bones fell into the empty stomach cavity as it decomposed.

final twist: lower down the same hill as Regourdou is another cave: Lascaux. Around 17 ka H. sapiens went into its darkness to paint vast horses and bulls across the ceiling, as the bodies of animals and a Neanderthal already 80,000 years old lay in a chamber somewhere far above them.

The Le Moustier 2 newborn mentioned earlier isn’t unique. One of the shortest Neanderthal lives ended around 70,000 years ago, in the Caucasus Mountains. A week or two old at most, it’s astonishingly well preserved. Just a whisker above the rock floor of Mezmaiskaya Cave, the tiny skeleton was found lying on its right side, knees flexed, legs drawn up, with its left arm bent slightly towards the chest.

Some of the flashier claims about La Ferrassie over the years haven’t held up, such as special objects in graves, or claims for circular carvings on a massive limestone slab covering LF6.

Taken together, although Shanidar isn’t exactly a Neanderthal necropolis, there’s absolutely more going on than the remains of those who perished by rockfalls.

The most complete cranium from Krapina bears a series of 35 mostly parallel tiny cut marks running from slightly above the brow ridge over the forehead towards the rear of the skull. Just 5mm (0.2in.) long, they don’t fit any butchery pattern, are totally unique at that site and have no parallels in any other hominin skulls, whatever the species. Yet they do recall something. They represent the longest series of sequential markings made by Neanderthals, even more than on the hyaena bone at Les Pradelles or the raven at Zaskalnaya. Their placement on a hominin bone, and moreover a skull – the most symbolically resonant part of the body – is extraordinary.

There may also be trends in what happened to whom. Neanderthal communities were certainly constituted by commonly understood categories including age and gender, probably reproductive status and sociability and skill levels. These characteristics would have influenced how individuals treated each other in life, and perhaps in death too. One of the most remarkable patterns is the apparent paucity of female skeletons.

Amud 7, a baby no older than 10 months, was excavated from a cave near the Dead Sea in the 1990s. Exactly like the Mezmaiskaya infant, it lay on bedrock on its right side, and despite some crushing by sediment, even fingers and toes were in the correct position. What marks Amud 7 out is that nestled right against its hip bone was a large red deer jaw. That species is common in the cave, but complete bones are rare. There is no intervening sediment, indicating that the heavy, perhaps still-fleshed jaw was placed directly on the corpse before it decayed.

There’s only one conclusion to draw from all this. If mortuary traditions extend beyond our own species, and even back to our last common ancestor with Neanderthals, then so too does a key definition of humanity.

Unusual freezer-like conditions inside Denisova Cave, in the Altai region of Siberia, opened up a ‘Wild East’ frontier, as DNA there was in exceptional condition. A sample extracted from D5, a toe bone, provided the first ‘high-coverage’ Neanderthal nuclear genome: our introduction to the recipe for another kind of human. Dubbed ‘the Altai Neanderthal’, the toe had belonged to a woman who died around 90 ka. She came from a truly venerable lineage that had separated from others some 40,000 or 50,000 years before.

Everything at this remarkable site makes it abundantly clear that, far from being static, these hominin populations saw huge flux over time. The most recent research even suggests there might be mixed ancestry in every hominin there. What makes Denisova so exceptional? No Neanderthal fossils or DNA have ever been found from farther east, and no Denisovans from farther west. Perhaps this cave was literally at the edge of their two worlds.

the first Neanderthal genome showed they had directly contributed to our own ancestry.

Though hominins were present in Eurasia well before 1 million years ago, the oldest H. sapiens fossils are certainly African. However, old notions about a particular ‘cradle of humanity’ have now been superseded. The most recent fossil and genetic evidence suggests we evolved from an anatomically diverse meta-population, connected across many regions of the continent.

But after this it seems the anatomical features shared by everyone today evolved over a long time, in different African regions. Brains grew rapidly after 500 ka, but skulls and bodies developed more slowly in a mosaic fashion. The people of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, living around 300 ka already had big brains and flat, modern-looking faces, but more archaic upper and rear skulls. The oldest H. sapiens skulls, pretty much like extant humans, date to around 200 to 150 ka in East Africa, around the same time that ‘classic’ Neanderthal anatomy was also coalescing.

it’s now clear that early H. sapiens were already many thousands of kilometres into East Asia probably before 100 ka, adapting to completely different ecologies.

To reach China somewhere around 120 to 80 ka, Sumatra by 73 to 63 ka and cross to Australia at least 65 ka, they must have walked over mountains, across deserts and through jungles – and probably also rode the waves in watercraft.

Current data finds between 1.8 and 2.6 per cent Neanderthal DNA in everyone except those of sub-Saharan heritage;3 but it’s not equally distributed. Western Europeans tend to have the least – 2 per cent or under – while Indigenous Americans, Asians and Oceanians, including Aboriginal Australians and Papuans, have up to a fifth more. We now also believe that there were multiple interbreeding episodes,

and in some cases they left their mark on Neanderthals too.

The Neanderthals’ common ancestors with Denisovans – Neandersovans – received DNA from a ‘super-archaic’ Eurasian hominin that had probably been around for 1.5 million years. After the Denisovans went their separate way, other shadowy signals for early mixing appear, this time with H. sapiens.

We also now know that interactions potentially happened closer to Europe. Just after the ‘Ust-Ishim results, DNA from another early H. sapiens fossil was published. This man died hundreds of kilometres westwards, at the Peştera cu Oase, Romania, between 42 and 37 ka. His genetic ancestry was nearly as mind-blowing as Denny’s, because about 11 per cent of it was Neanderthal.

Taken together, there are at least three and potentially six periods since 200 ka when Neanderthals made babies with us.

None of this really fits with Neanderthals and us. They walked upright, carried tools, probably wore garments and had some kind of speech. It’s highly improbable that there wasn’t a mutual recognition on both sides that the beings before them were people, albeit of a new sort.

While at most just 2 to 3 per cent of any living person’s genome is Neanderthal, it’s still a significant amount. Can we trace the biological, or even psychological, effects of assimilating their essence?

The actual number of genes we’re talking about is tiny, and natural selection certainly removed much of what came over in each hybridisation phase.

Living people with dual ancestry from Neanderthals and Denisovans seem to have ‘preferred’ the Neanderthal version of some genes involved in the skin’s defences against infections. Similarly, a gene protecting us against bacteria that cause stomach ulcers came across from both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but people carrying two Neanderthal versions have extra resistance. Eurasia presented other challenges for H. sapiens without hundreds of millennia adapting to its lower levels of UV and seasonal winter darkness. East Asians and Europeans share Neanderthal versions of keratin-related genes that make hair, nails and skin. It’s possible they were more useful than forms we’d developed in tropical environments. But on the other hand, Neanderthals had diverse hair and skin pigment, so things must have been complex.

Body clock genes are another area where we kept Neanderthal versions, and this is likely to do with the fact that circadian rhythms are strongly linked to day length and light levels. Perhaps Neanderthals passed on something that helped H. sapiens learn to cope with the especially long, dark winters.

mutation in all living people makes us between 100 to 1,000 times less susceptible to smoke and charred food toxicity. Since inhaling smoke from open fires or poorly vented stoves is the main cause of death globally for children under 5 years old, this is no small issue.

The parts of our genome relating to X and Y chromosomes have a clear lack of Neanderthal contributions.

the ancestral version of the FOXP2 gene didn’t stick, indicating that the version we’d evolved in the meantime was important.

At Denisova, the Altai Neanderthal woman’s parents must have been one of the following: double first cousins (sharing both sets of grandparents), an aunt with a nephew, a grandparent with grandchild, or even half-siblings. By many cultural definitions, that’s more like incest than inbreeding. Further analysis of her DNA also found relatively close, if less extreme, relationships between her ancestors over many generations.