Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

So ‘meat and veg’ were, in some times and places, a fair description of what Neanderthals consumed ... but how? Were there bubbling stews alongside fat-dripping roasts, or was their kitchen-craft mostly raw? Certainly that’s possible for some food, but cooking not only makes things edible, it also improves nutritional value and often aids digestion, whether meat or plant. While we’ll explore debates over Neanderthal control of fire in the next chapter, there’s good evidence for some level of meat cooking. Faunal remains that combine burning damage from different temperatures most likely indicates roasting on a fire, since bone would be burned more than areas covered by flesh.

Of course, many toys are often simplified or miniaturised versions of practical items. Specially sized artefacts just might be visible, however, in some of the Schöningen spears that are noticeably shorter than others. They’re clearly not ‘pretend’ weapons, but perhaps sized for – or by – smaller hands. A

The emotional existence of Neanderthals who lived, worked, ate and slept together was rich and based on cooperation.

Their collective hunting was mirrored in the sharing of meat and the arrangements of their sites. Born into loving arms, they grew up into complicated social beings, driven as much as we are by passions both devotional and destructive. And like an amplification of sound, collaboration within Neanderthal groups may well have evolved in tandem with multiple generations and storytelling.

In a world un-hazed by light pollution, the night sky arcing above their heads and the regularly shifting moon may have become part of murmured songs around a fire. Certainly, place itself and how it’s bound up with experiences and memories of relations with things, animals and others would be central to how they understood the world. When histories and lineages merge with land, what happens...

But the genetic patterns in living people tell us assimilation to some degree did happen. Though Neanderthals remained physically distinct even in their last visible skeletal remains, the scale and repetition of interbreeding, plus the range of retained genes in us, means they were – and are – human. Biologically speaking, individuals who can mate and create viable offspring are the same species. 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.

further irony is that long-standing claims that early H. sapiens possessed some intrinsic superiority are far from tenable. The Oase man’s people went extinct in Europe, and are instead closer to today’s Indigenous Americans and East Asians. Even more striking is the ‘Ust-Ishim man. He lived either just before or just after the deepest genetic division into what would become ancient eastern and western Eurasian H. sapiens lineages. Yet he’s unrelated to almost any living people.7 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.8

Today we know Eurasia was always a melting pot, home to hundreds, perhaps thousands of hybrid children. Neanderthal sites may be secretly hosting more evidence of them, or their close descendants, scattered among unidentified bone fragments or cave sediments.

Let’s finish our shared journey through these pages by letting your guard down. Push against the impossible, and perform a quantum shift back in time to the Pleistocene. Close your eyes and pick a world: a grassy plain under cool winter sun; a warm forest track, soft loam underfoot; or a now-sunken rocky coast, gulls’ cries salting the air. Now listen, step forward, she’s here: