More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
routinely as breathing, Neanderthals paid attention to their rock: selecting the choicest types, playing with novel ways to fragment, shifting concepts and skills as needed.
Thinking of Neanderthals as experimenters pushing boundaries may be unfamiliar, but this new view is grounded in the archaeology.
12 layers, spanning 40,000 years.2 Hundreds of hearths, many tens of thousands of lithics and bones are preserved alongside perishable things like leaves, pinecones and carbonised wood.
use-wear confirms that they were cutting meat and skins, in addition to scraping wood.
Neanderthals emerged from a Lower Palaeolithic world where animal remains were already entangled with the production of lithics, but they both amplified and transformed these early traditions.
Over the past three decades the clear trend is for technological lines between Neanderthals and early H. sapiens to grow fuzzier:
Composite tools in themselves also imply impressive mental capacity to plan, design and anticipate.
many of the things Neanderthals made moved considerable distances.
We may well be looking at the emergence of craft specialists in at least some of the technical realms of knapping, wood carving, adhesive production and other activities like hunting or hide working.
range of skills and great accomplishment across diverse materials demonstrated by Neanderthals strongly implies some sort of teaching, matching the fact that directed instruction is common to all living humans.
cultural traditions,
a whopping 3,500 to 5,000kcal every day. That’s over twice today’s typical adult guidelines, and even beyond what world-class athletes burn through.
Living in tough and cold landscapes also pushes energy needs even further. Travelling through boreal forests filled with deep snow
pattern of primary access to carcasses is there early: despite wolves and sabretooth cats lurking
If fewer than 10 per cent of faunal remains have carnivore gnawing, it’s fairly safe to say most of the bones in a site came from Neanderthal food waste.
How exactly were Neanderthals killing all the beasts found in Fumane and hundreds of other sites?
Carbon and nitrogen isotopes from hominin bones can give an idea of where they fitted into local ecosystem food chains,
Canny use of landscape features combined with knowledge of animal behaviour must have underlain situations like the 50-odd horses
By reading the pattern of cut marks across the skeleton, we see time and again that brains as well as other juicy parts like eyeballs, tongues and viscera were favoured by Neanderthals.
For many decades it was assumed H. sapiens were more efficient, inventive hunters,
Neanderthals were regularly eating birds, over long periods of time.
roasted upside-down to weaken the shell
honey,
Wherever bears slumbered, hibernation offered a relatively safe hunting opportunity,
burning hints at cooking right there in the den.
carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes only reflect protein, not carbs.
range of vegetable scraps in Neanderthals’ hearths is impressive:
teeth. Eating produces wear patterns that can be linked to hardness of foods,
A truly twenty-first-century development in calculus analysis has been using DNA to try and identify foods,
perhaps considerable processing by cooking.
cooking not only makes things edible, it also improves nutritional value and often aids digestion,
good evidence for some level of meat cooking.
how did a culture with no ceramic or metal containers do this?
simplest way to store meat (and the hardest to detect archaeologically) is by making jerky – it requires only drying,
fermentation.
Could Neanderthals have had specialised roles in subsistence?
In terms of their diet, Neanderthals weren’t stuck in an evolutionary rut.
in the vast majority of locales it’s not possible to distinguish occupation phases shorter than a millennium, never mind a century. That’s because an archaeological layer can swallow up surprising amounts of time:
Nobody today denies they used fire (as hominins have for over a million years),
But the question of whether Neanderthals simply scavenged it or could produce it is, perhaps surprisingly, still debated.
sometimes Neanderthals invested in constructing hearth features.
Neanderthals there were burning brown coal.
Across many hunter-gatherer societies there’s a spectrum in how fire is used: big open-air blazes for protection, pit fires for roasting, small cooking fires, hide-smoking fires, sleeping hearths for warmth, even anti-insect ‘smudge’ fires. Neanderthal sites show a strikingly close match to the variety in ethnographic data.
bodily waste was routinely incinerated along with grass and potentially
built living space,
they were among the first hominins to create complex, intentional divisions of space,
Neanderthals were fundamentally nomadic.
Among recent hunter-gatherers, settling in one place for a long time – or only moving across small areas – is rare,
open, colder settings require people to be highly mobile and move methodically over huge ranges.
animal kill sites are identifiable precisely because they lack the later-stage lithic products and the richest parts of hunted animals.
