Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

In 2020 a high-coverage genome from Chagyrskaya, Siberia, didn’t show inbreeding between parents, but came from a reproductive population just as small as the relatively nearby Altai woman’s, averaging about 60 individuals for many generations. In stark contrast, the earliest H. sapiens genome from Ust’-Ishim has more diverse DNA than any Neanderthal sampled so far. This implies that the interconnectedness of H. sapiens’ social networks may well have been different right from the start.

Yet so far we’ve sampled fewer than 40 Neanderthals – and have only 3 high-coverage genomes – from among the thousands of skeletal parts in museums, representing hundreds of individuals.

Bones and genomes have been at the forefront of recent research into the last Neanderthals, but was DNA the only thing they exchanged with us?

There’s the Szeletian in Hungary, Bohunician in the Czech Republic, Uluzzian in Italy, Bachokirian in Bulgaria and the cobbled-together Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician identified in Britain, Belgium and Eastern Europe. The million-dollar question is who made them. The Proto-Aurignacian, which follows intermediate cultures in Europe, has produced H. sapiens mtDNA from a tooth at Fumane. But skeletal remains are vanishingly rare before this, and frustratingly, many key sites were either excavated over 40 years ago, or have obvious signs of disturbance or mixing between layers.

Néron Cave, 70km (40mi.) upriver from Mandrin,

Chimpanzees and bonobos, who are both physically and socially quite different, have only been separated since around 850 ka; roughly the same time that our own ancestors separated from the lineage that would lead to Neanderthals and Denisovans.

allotaxa may be more appropriate for what Neanderthals were to us: closely related species that vary in bodies and behaviours, yet can also reproduce. Yaks and cattle are an example, and it was certainly happening in Pleistocene fauna too:

outside Africa we nearly went extinct at least once, and suffered a major population crash around 70 ka, just before the majority of interbreeding with Neanderthals. Moreover, despite dispersing populations obviously spreading all the way into Australia by 65 ka – adapting to arid deserts and wet mountain forests, even an ocean crossing to Indonesia – there’s no clear sign of H. sapiens in Central or Western Europe until more than 20,000 years later.

what we can make out archaeologically is far from the whole story.

Furthermore, during the 25,000 years after Oase, it appears that successive Upper Palaeolithic populations totally replaced each other, and were then replaced in their turn by later prehistoric cultures. Parisians, Londoners or Berliners today with ostensibly European heritage have very little connection even to Mesolithic people just 10,000 years ago. The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic.

By 20,000 years ago, we were alone on the surface of this planet. Nonetheless, the Neanderthals still lived, after a fashion. Even as our encounters fell out of all memory, our blood and our babies still contain the fruits of interactions with the universe’s other experiments in being human.

In these final pages, we can reconsider what happened. First: bodies. There’s relatively little evidence for specific features that gave us dramatic advantages. Differences in walking were marginal, although running less so. Neanderthals’ beefiness did not come at the expense of fine grip; just as much as early H. sapiens, Neanderthals had the hands of artisans. For virtually every anatomical negative, there are plausible counterbalances.

Though some Neanderthal lineages were less genetically isolated than others, overall the wider population had been slowly withering for hundreds of thousands of years. For all their cleverness, flexibility and resilience, the archaeology does suggest they had weaker and smaller social networks made up of small groups that rarely came together in large gatherings.

Shared symbolic networks reflecting connections with far-flung communities are what define the post-Neanderthal world.

Yet the Neanderthals were never some sort of highway service station en route to Real People. They were state-of-the-art humans, just of a different sort. Their fate was a tapestry woven from the lives of individual hybrid babies, entire assimilated groups, and in remoter corners of Eurasia, lonely dwindling lineages – endlings – who left nothing behind but DNA sifting slowly down into the dirt of a cave floor.