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there’s no evidence anywhere for truly long-term settlement, on the order of many months.
Some were short stopping places, others homes for longer periods, but all were points on a cycle of movement.
Total population estimates tend to be in tens of thousands or even less.
Studies on recent hunter-gatherers find an average of about 25 people who largely live and travel with each other. Known
no sites have been found where large numbers of contemporary hearths and activity areas would indicate a mass gathering.
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.
Mobility isotopes provide information on where an individual had previously lived,
by comparing the values in teeth to the geology where they were found, it’s possible to see movement from different geological areas,
Among recent hunter-gatherers, the size of regularly traversed land varies drastically, from 250 to over 20,000km2 (100 to 7,700mi.2).
Their closest fellow predators in social terms are wolves, where up to a fifth of individuals at some point are wanderers between packs.
making glue.
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,
Compared to the millions of years before, Neanderthal existence was a major upgrade to hominin life.
the only monumental construction known to have been made by Neanderthals.
Whether Neanderthals had any kind of language is, of course, one of the most enduring questions about them.
Compared to the entire Homo lineage, Neanderthals’ brains are, like ours, enormous.
our own brains have slightly shrunk since early H. sapiens, with no apparent shrivelling in cognitive capacity.
Neanderthal vocal cords could make pretty much the same range of sounds as ours.
When it was confirmed that Neanderthals had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it was taken as strong evidence that they could ‘talk’.
captive apes can learn to express simple ideas – such as ‘give ball’ – using graphical symbols. But they never use this skill to casually chat, despite this defining everyday human communication.
pigments at more than 70 sites, just in Europe.
The weight of evidence from more and more cases of pigment use and mark making is increasingly leading even sceptics to accept that Neanderthals had an aesthetic, symbolic element to their lives.
captive chimpanzees, when materials and the idea of painting are supplied, enjoy colouring and marking surfaces.
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;
many women in traditional societies without reliable contraception tend to either be pregnant or breastfeeding.
It’s even been theorised that a need for birth attenders makes H. sapiens unique.
The dire death rates in seventeenth-century Parisian hospitals, for instance, where you were more likely than not to die giving birth, were down to high infection rates and crude medical interventions. In contrast, traditional societies with informal midwifery traditions, whether hunter-gatherers or not, can be safer.2
dental isotopes
barium is one isotope that’s been proposed as a breastmilk marker.
Injuries and illness, sometimes severe, are very common in hunter-gatherer societies,
numerous bones testify that some outlasted their maladies.
obviously toothless Neanderthal elders like at La Chapelle-aux-Saints existed,
convincing case for long-term support.
orangutans have been seen applying chewed-up leaves to their skin, of the same species used by local Indigenous cultures for pain relief.
Not all Neanderthals were inbred in genetic terms,
Aboriginal cultures, where knowledge of subtle changes in star brightness was maintained over centuries, as well as the 4-millennia-old
cannibalism,
Descendants from deep population branches were still surviving scattered across western Eurasia by 50 to 40 ka.
Dating around 45 to 40 ka, this was the furthest east any Neanderthal had yet been found,
Siberia.
Two main branches split, then remained isolated in Europe and Asia for millennia.
Denisovans
as a population diverged from Neanderthals before 600 ka.
Everything points to Denisovans as an Asian species.
ancestors had at some point interbred with Neanderthals,
the only first-generation hominin hybrid ever found.
the first Neanderthal genome
showed they had directly contributed to our own ancestry.
people lacking sub-Saharan African heritage had significantly more matches to Neanderthals.
