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450 to 400 thousand years ago (ka).
north Wales across to the borders of China, and southwards to the fringes of Arabia’s deserts.
1856.
Homo neanderthalensis.
1950s with radiocarbon,
first recorded descriptions of a prehistoric stone tool comes from 1673, when a triangular-shaped artefact
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac,
prehistoric wonderland,
mammoth tusk with markings on it. That very day,
engraved lines formed the distinctive domed head of a mammoth,
Close your eyes, shake off your shoes. Dulled solar redness glows beyond eyelids, grass prickles toes and dust lies beneath your soles. Warmth brushes your arm as a hand slips around yours; somehow you know who it is. Open your eyes, and below a sky both bright with sun and somehow star-speckled black, your mother stands before you. This is the place out of time, where all humans find each other. Rustling footfalls approach, and another woman steps forward: your maternal grandmother. Maybe you spoke to her last week, or twenty years ago, or maybe you only know her from blurred photos. She
...more
Wow
over 20 identified hominin species from just the last 3.5
age of around 450 to 430 ka and anatomy that make them prime suspects for being true proto-Neanderthals, confirmed in 2016 by DNA analysis.
many simultaneous pathways existed, some finishing in dead ends, others like Neanderthals developing their own unique bodies and minds
among all the recent human evolution discoveries, perhaps the most startling for understanding the Neanderthals is that they could and did interbreed with us.
thousands of fossils from many, many sites. They represent a couple of hundred individuals,
Archaeology distinguishes between different parts or features of a site.
assemblage,
layers,
stratigraphy.
taphonomy,
Only DNA can identify if children were female or male, but their age can be worked out from teeth and bones.
apparently bigger brains are actually due to sex-biased samples:
they absolutely walked as upright as us.
Both we and they inherited some ancient features in common, but their lineage kept others we lost, while the reverse is also true.
extreme athletes’ muscles over time can change their skeleton.
initially their bones were mostly found in clearly glacial contexts,
increased exercise makes not just the limbs of young animals more robust, but their whole bodies.
most of the strength was in the upper arms,
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.
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.
looked at over the full span of time between around 400 to 45 ka, contrary to the clichés, Neanderthals actually lived through more interglacials than glacials.
Drastic transformations in temperature, environment and even sea level sometimes happened over the span of a human lifetime.
when they disappeared. This falls around
40 ka in MIS 3, meaning its climate and environments
what makes this climate cycle distinctive is its instability, temperatures see-sawing rapidly up and down.
123 ka as the sub-stage MIS 5e,
It’s our own pigeon-holing tendencies that limit Neanderthals to glacial worlds, when the reality is far more diverse.
lithics are extraordinarily rich sources of insight about Neanderthal lives.
‘Palaeolithic’ for the most ancient prehistory,
the first Neanderthal fossils to be found seemed to have no accompanying artefacts
knapping features on cores and flakes, researchers can reconstruct the method of knapping and to some extent its sequence,
However cleverly Neanderthals made flakes, for many decades it appeared that they were unable to produce lithic blades, which define the subsequent Upper Palaeolithic culture made by H. sapiens.
Quina lithics were used to cut up carcasses and scrape flesh off skins, typically
why they chose to knap in particular ways and varied the intensity of retouching. Consistent patterns exist across virtually every site, confirming that not only did they preferentially choose high-quality stone when expecting artefacts to require resharpening due to long-term use, but for the same reason
This implies not only constant weighing up and decision making, but an extraordinary knowledge of the geology across wide regions.
For the last 40,000 years of their existence, Neanderthals were manifestly experiencing massive upheavals in climate and potentially also population disruption, but rather
than failing to adapt, their archaeological record is brimming with evidence of innovation and cultural evolution.
The enduring myth that Neanderthal technology was stuck in some kind of cognitive mire, bogged down by minds unable to innovate, is false.
