Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Lascaux’s leaping bulls are closer in time to the photos on your phone than to the panels of horses and lions at Chauvet.

Out of thousands of fossils, there are only two strong cases for Neanderthal-on-Neanderthal assault. One is another Shanidar adult whose chest was stabbed so deeply the wound slashed across two ribs; yet they survived. The ribs healed and, remarkably, grew around part of the weapon that remained inside.

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.

Over 99 per cent of all artefacts from the Middle Palaeolithic are stone. Unlike organic things it cannot rot. Objects made from living things, whether animal or plant, are extraordinarily rare in comparison; teeth and bone survive better than wood, but not always. Yet such substances make up the vast majority of hunter-gatherer technologies, making it likely that there’s a whole ‘ghost’ realm of Neanderthal artefacts we’re missing. Sometimes we see their shadows: use-wear on lithics from many sites matches wood or plants. And very occasionally, precious objects survived the millennia, testifying to the existence of lost multitudes.

appearance of layers can be deceptive, and a reminder that more than 99 per cent of all the assemblages archaeologists study aren’t from single occupations but represent patterns of behaviour over at least one if not many generations. ‘Time-averaged’ assemblages like that are far from useless, but to understand them better we need to discern the minutiae of Neanderthal life.

While there’s been a lot of back-and-forth debates over this, today it appears that Neanderthal throats could make pretty much the same range of sounds as ours.

Cioarei-Boroşteni’s significance lies in showing that Neanderthals, over considerable periods of time, were interested in applying colour to unusual things. That, fundamentally, is a definition of art.

While Indigenous bodies – and most recently, DNA – have been exploited to further Neanderthal research, their knowledge and world views were largely deemed irrelevant to scientific understanding of the past. But the insights of hunter-gatherer communities show how vital it is to centre perspectives that don’t originate in largely urban Western scientific traditions.

A recent project modelled the collaborative possibilities, inviting expert Ju/’hoan San trackers from Namibia to examine physical traces within European Upper Palaeolithic caves. Their knowledge identified new tracks, and gave fresh interpretations of what was happening in these places.

Using such ideas, we might reimagine Neanderthal interactions with other animals. Current interpretations are structured around themes of dominance, exploitation and conflict; life as struggle against nature, and animals as unthinking, unfeeling commodities. In stark contrast, relational frameworks emphasise the similarities between human and non-human. Hierarchies exist, blood is still spilled, but a relational world is filled with communities based on recognition of common personhood, of which humans are members, not masters. Human survival is not in conflict with creatures, but entwined in relationships with them.

Death and the responses to it are another area that’s well overdue for fresh interpretations. Even without continuing obsessions over the absence of neatly dug graves, discussions of body processing tend to be limited to nutritional cannibalism or violent scenarios that say more about our assumptions than any solid data.

When we imagine interactions revolving around more than antagonism, fear and struggle, there’s even potential to see the story of Neanderthals and humans another way. Instead of H. sapiens as colonisers pushing into fresh lands ripe for exploitation, a different story suggests itself. A world that opens itself up, paths unfurling as seasons change, offering new opportunities. Unfamiliar lands and creatures to meet; new-yet-ancient peoples becoming partners in a never-ending dance.

Finishing this book in the late spring of 2020, it’s impossible not to wonder if a terrible contagion might have been added into the mix, jumping from us to them. Obviously invisible on skeletons or in genomes, nonetheless what seemed like a fringe concern over the past decades no longer appears so unlikely.

Fundamentally, the long obsession over the Neanderthals’ fate reflects our deep dread of annihilation. Extinction is frightening; even the syllables slam up against each other. Is it a coincidence that as our species belatedly wakes up to what may be its greatest threat, apocalyptic fiction becomes all the rage? In the face of obliteration, we desire comforting parables where we are always the Ones Who Lived. What’s more, we want to feel special: most of the stories we’ve told about Neanderthals have been narcissistic reassurances that we ‘won’ because we’re outstanding, destined to survive.