The Dawn of Human Culture (22 page)

It doesn’t follow that Neanderthals and modern humans

couldn’t interbreed or that they never did, but the DNA results strongly 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 186

186

| THE DAWN OF HUMAN CULTURE

support fossil and archeological findings that if interbreeding occurred, it was rare, and it will be very difficult to detect. To us, this inference, together with fossil evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans had long been on separate evolutionary tracks, justifies their assignment to the separate species
Homo neanderthalensis
and
Homo sapiens
respectively.

* * *

When we place Neanderthals and modern humans in separate species, we are implying that the Neanderthals are extinct, for only modern humans survive. But what then happened to the Neanderthals? How could a group that had been successful in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years fail to survive to the present, or, as archaeology shows, even beyond 30,000 years ago? We believe the answer is clear: they disappeared because they could not compete effectively with modern humans of African origin, who appeared on their doorstep beginning about 40,000 years ago. The proof is in the archeological record.

Archeologists assign the artifact assemblages that the Neanderthals made to the Mousterian Tradition or Culture, named for the Le Moustier rock shelters in southwestern France where archeologists excavated such artifacts beginning in the 1860s. The Mousterian is known alternatively as the Middle Paleolithic, and it succeeds the Lower Paleolithic, whose primary manifestation in Europe is the Acheulean (hand axe) Tradition. The Mousterian is distinguished from the Acheulean primarily by the absence of large hand axes and other large “core” tools. The reason that Mousterian people stopped making 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 187

Neanderthals Out on a Limb | 187

large hand axes remains obscure, but the most plausible speculation is that they had discovered a way to haft stone flakes on wooden handles, and the new tools performed the same functions as hand axes but were easier to make or to carry around.

The timing of the shift from the Acheulean to the Mousterian is not yet firmly established, and it need not have been exactly the same everywhere. Current evidence suggests that the last Acheulean people lived in Europe between 250,000 and 200,000 years ago. The Mousterian then persisted until after 50,000 years ago, when it was replaced by the Upper Paleolithic. In general, the Upper Paleolithic was distinguished from the Mousterian by the presence of numerous especially long flakes or “blades,” often struck from specially prepared cores, and by an abundance of chisel-ended tools known as burins (Figure 6.6). The term burin is taken from the French for a modern metal engraving tool, and Upper Paleolithic people probably often used stone burins to engrave or incise in bone, ivory, or antler. They manufactured many different kinds of burins and a wide variety of other, readily recognizable stone and bone artifact types. Particular types are often restricted to certain times and places, which has allowed archeologists to define multiple Upper Paleolithic cultures.

Among the most famous are the Aurignacian Culture, which stretched from Bulgaria to Spain between about 37,000 and 29,000 years ago, the Gravettian Culture, which extended from Portugal across southern and central Europe to European Russia between roughly 28,000 and 21,000 years ago, the Solutrean Culture which existed in France and Spain between about 21,000 and 16,500 years ago, and the Magdalenian Culture, which occupied France, northern Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and southern Britain between about 16,500 and 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 188

188

| THE DAWN OF HUMAN CULTURE

carinate (keel-shaped)

dihedral burin

endscraper on a blade

endscrapers

0

0

5 cm

2 in

leaf-shaped points with

flat, invasive, bifacial retouch

backed blades

characteristic Upper Paleolithic tool types

denticulate

point

sidescraper

characteristic Mousterian tool types

FIGURE 6.6

Characteristic Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic stone artifact types. Upper Paleolithic people manufactured a much wider range of readily recognizable stone tool types, and the types varied much more through time and space.

06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 189

Neanderthals Out on a Limb | 189

11,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic is ordinarily said to terminate about 11,000 years ago, but it was replaced by cultures that differed from it not so much in artifacts as in their adaptation to milder interglacial climatic conditions beginning between 12,000 and 10,000

years ago.

Determining exactly when the Upper Paleolithic first appeared is important to us here, because the people who made Upper Paleolithic artifacts were anatomically modern. They are often known popularly as the Cro-Magnons, from a rock shelter in southwestern France where their bones were found with early Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian) artifacts in 1868 (Figure 6.4). Artifacts far outnumber human bones in ancient sites, and tracking the appearance of the earliest Upper Paleolithic artifacts across Europe can thus tell us how quickly the Mousterians (Neanderthals) succumbed. For simplicity, in this chapter, we equate Neanderthal with Mousterian and Cro-Magnon with Upper Paleolithic, although we will see that the equation is imperfect, since some late Neanderthals apparently produced Upper Paleolithic artifacts, and the African contemporaries of the Neanderthals made Mousterian-like artifacts, even though the Africans were more Cro-Magnon-like in their anatomy.

Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons shared many advanced behavioral traits including a refined ability to flake stone, burial of the dead, at least on occasion, full control over fire (implied by the abundance of hearths in their sites), and a heavy dependence on meat probably obtained mainly through hunting. In addition, both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skeletal remains sometimes reveal debilitating disabilities that imply that the people cared for their old and their sick. There could be no more compelling indication of shared humanity.

06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 190

190

| THE DAWN OF HUMAN CULTURE

Still, there are many behavioral (archeological) respects in which the Neanderthals appear to have been significantly more primitive than the Cro-Magnons. First and foremost, with one intriguing exception that we address below, the Neanderthals left no compelling evidence for art or jewelry, and perhaps in keeping with this, their graves contain nothing to suggest burial ritual or ceremony. We could even surmise that they dug graves simply to remove an unpleasant inconvenience from needed living space. Neanderthal stone flaking techniques may have been extraordinarily refined, but compared to the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals nonetheless produced a very small range of readily distinguishable stone tool types. They also rarely if ever crafted artifacts from plastic substances like bone, ivory, shell, or antler. Perhaps because Neanderthals produced such a small range of stone artifact types and virtually no bone tools, their artifact assemblages are remarkably homogeneous over vast areas and many millennia. The advent of the Upper Paleolithic witnessed a sharp acceleration in assemblage variability through time and space, which is reflected in the multiplicity of distinct Upper Paleolithic cultures to which we have already referred. Most of these can be further subdivided into smaller, spatially and chronologically circumscribed units that probably mark identity-conscious, ethnic groups in the modern sense. Neither the Mousterian nor anything that precedes it has provided comparably compelling material evidence for ethnicity.

Both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons frequently sheltered in caves, and the stratification of Mousterian layers below Upper Paleolithic ones provided the first evidence that Neanderthals preceded the Cro-Magnons in Europe. Artifact densities tend to be low in Neanderthal layers, however, and throughout Europe, Neanderthals 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 191

Neanderthals Out on a Limb | 191

often ceded their caves to bears, hyenas, or wolves. In contrast, artifact densities tend to be higher in Cro-Magnon layers, and the people had the caves pretty much to themselves. This implies that Cro-Magnon populations were larger and that the people competed more effectively with other potential cave dwellers. They may in fact have driven the cave bear to extinction, for the last known cave bear fossils date from the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. Finally, when Neanderthals occupied sites outside caves, they left no persuasive evidence for substantial “houses,” even though the people often faced extraordinarily cool conditions. Cro-Magnon sites are the oldest to provide indisputable

“ruins,” and the well-heated homes they imply help to explain why the Cro-Magnons were the first to expand into the harshest, most continental parts of northeastern Europe where no one had lived before.

To some archeologists, cataloguing the behavioral differences between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons smacks of Neanderthal-bashing, a kind of paleo-racism that all caring people should resist. Yet, our point is precisely that skeletal remains and genes imply that Neanderthals were not analogous to a modern “race,” however that is defined. Modern “races” all originated very recently, mostly within the past 10,000 years, and we don’t need genetics to tell us that they routinely interbreed. We also have abundant evidence that a member of any modern “race” can become a fully functional member of any modern culture. If we accept the idea of human evolution, we must also accept that some ancient human populations differed from modern humans not only in appearance, but also in their behavioral potential, and to us, the Neanderthals fill the bill, despite their large brains, their patent humanity, and their relatively recent existence. In sum, we suggest that they disappeared not simply because they didn’t behave in a fully 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 192

192

| THE DAWN OF HUMAN CULTURE

modern way, but because they couldn’t. Unfortunately, the one piece of evidence that could confirm this completely—a structural analysis of the Neanderthal brain—is not available and probably never will be.

* * *

A reader who has just seen us deny Neanderthal art and burial ritual may wonder about contrary observations in the popular press. These observations receive such wide attention precisely because they are so rare, and this alone suggests a qualitative difference from the Upper Paleolithic where new evidence for art or ritual is hardly newsworthy in itself. Moreover, given that nature is bound to mimic art every once in a while, that Upper Paleolithic objects may occasionally filter down undetected into Mousterian layers, and that archeologists have now excavated scores of Mousterian sites, it would be remarkable if such sites did not occasionally produce an apparent Mousterian art object or ritual item. Some may even be genuine, but we present two cases here that we think illustrate a common problem—the probability or at least strong possibility that most such items originated naturally.

The first and probably most famous case comes from Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq. To this point, we have emphasized the European origin of the Neanderthals, but 80,000 to 70,000 years ago when global climate turned sharply cooler, the Neanderthals expanded their range to western Asia. At this time, they actually seem to have displaced anatomically modern or near-modern humans who had expanded to the southwest Asian margin of Africa during the especially warm early part of the last interglacial episode, between roughly 125,000 and 90,000 years ago.

06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 193

Neanderthals Out on a Limb | 193

Between 1957 and 1961, archeologist Ralph Solecki of Colum-bia University uncovered a thick sequence of Upper Paleolithic layers overlying an even thicker series of Mousterian layers at Shanidar Cave.

The Mousterian layers provided the remains of nine Neanderthals, mainly if not entirely from graves. In the course of the excavation, Solecki routinely sampled the sediments to determine if they preserved fossil pollen that could illuminate the ancient vegetation, and he collected several samples from the vicinity of an adult male Neanderthal skeleton known as Shanidar IV. Two of these samples turned out to contain numerous, large clumps of flower pollen from eight different species. Historically, local people used seven of the eight as herbs or medicines, and since flower pollen was lacking in sediment samples from other graves, Solecki speculated that the Shanidar IV male was a Neanderthal medicine-man or shaman who was laid to rest on a bed of flowers. He concluded that “The association of flowers with Neanderthals [sic] adds a whole new dimension to our knowledge of his humanness, indicating that he had a ‘soul’.”

Solecki’s beguiling conclusion cannot be simply dismissed, but paleoanthropologists generally agree that a cultural (behavioral) explanation should be accepted only if an equally plausible natural explanation can be ruled out. In this instance, a small burrowing rodent, the gerbil-like Persian jird, provides a plausible natural alternative.

Burrows of jirds or other small rodents riddled the sediments near each Shanidar burial, and Solecki’s team often used their number and angle to home in on possible graves. Since jirds are known to store large numbers of seeds and flowers at points within their burrows, they could easily have deposited the flower pollen near Shanidar IV. The jird explanation is less exciting than the human one, but it is in keeping 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 194

194

| THE DAWN OF HUMAN CULTURE

with the total lack of evidence for ritual with other Neanderthal burials, including the others at Shanidar Cave.

Our second example comes from Divje Babe Cave 1 in the alpine foothills of Slovenia. Divje Babe 1 is a prime instance of what we had in mind when we said that bears occupied many Mousterian caves as often as people. Excavations at Divje Babe 1 directed by Ivan Turk of the Slovenian Institute of Archeology have uncovered a few dozen Mousterian artifacts and some fossil fireplaces, but ninety-nine percent of the bones come from cave bears who appear to have died on the spot.