Neanderthals (the ‘th’ pronounced as ‘t’) are our closest extinct human relative. Some defining features of their skulls include the large middle part of the face, angled cheek bones, and a huge nose for humidifying and warming cold, dry air. Their bodies were shorter and stockier than ours, another adaptation to living in cold environments. But their brains were larger. Neanderthals made and used a diverse set of sophisticated tools, controlled fire, lived in shelters, made and wore clothing, were skilled hunters of large animals and ate plant foods, and occasionally made symbolic or ornamental objects. There is evidence that Neanderthals deliberately buried their dead and occasionally even marked their graves with offerings, such as flowers. No other primates, and no earlier human species, had ever practiced this sophisticated and symbolic behavior. DNA has been recovered from more than a dozen Neanderthal fossils, all from Europe; the Neanderthal Genome Project is one of the exciting new areas of human origins research.
The first Neanderthal fossil was found in 1829, but it was not recognized as a possible human ancestor until more fossils were discovered during the second half of the 19th century. Since then, thousands of fossils representing the remains of many hundreds of Neanderthal individuals have been recovered from sites across Europe and the Middle East. These include babies, children and adults up to about 40 years of age.
The ideas about Neanderthals have changed from brutes to almost (but not quite human) and now there is a big controversy about how close they are to homo sapiens sapiens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal ). Almost everything about Neanderthal behavior is controversial. From their physiology, Neanderthals are presumed to have been omnivores, but animal protein formed most of their dietary protein, showing them to have been apex predators and not scavengers. Some studies suggest they cooked vegetables.
Since 2010, there has been growing evidence for admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. This admixture is reflected in the genomes of modern European and Asian populations, but not in the genomes of most sub-Saharan Africans. This suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans took place after the recent “out of Africa” migration, likely between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.
During the early 20th century, a prevailing view of Neanderthals as “simian”, influenced by Arthur Keith and Marcellin Boule, tended to exaggerate the anatomical differences between Neanderthals and Cro Magnon. This first impression has endured, and some anthropologist take insult to Neanderthals being consider human, even though cranial size, an indicator of brain capacity, is larger for Neanderthals than Homo sapiens.
When geologist William King introduced a new species of human, Homo neanderthalensis, to the European scientific community in 1864, he wasn’t very generous toward our extinct evolutionary cousins.
“I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute,” King concluded after examining the skull that had been found in the Neander Valley, Germany, a decade earlier.
It was a lousy, and lasting, first impression. Thus, “Neanderthal” became not only a new species, but a pejorative term. However, research has come a long way since then: So how smart were the Neanderthals, based on what we know today? Anthropologists’ early perception of Neanderthals was partly rooted in racist ideology that one’s intelligence or humanity could be assessed from skull shape, said João Zilhão, a professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) at the University of Barcelona. Many of those scientists also shared a view that evolution was all about progress, and that ancestral human species like Neanderthals were necessarily much more “primitive” than humans are today. Those assumptions have been discredited (if not hard to shake from Western science and pop culture). Humbling new discoveries over the past few decades have helped to rehabilitate Neanderthals’ reputation as people who were a lot like us.
“The only way to assess their intelligence — whatever that means, but that’s a different issue — is by what they did,” Zilhão told Live Science. And it turns out that Neanderthals did a lot of things that were once thought to be exclusive to modern human culture.
They worked stones and bones into tools and ornaments much like the kind created by modern humans who were alive at the same time. (Neanderthals lived in Europe and Southwest Asia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago.) They invented glue using tar from birch bark to attach wooden handles to stones. They made necklaces from eagle talons. Neanderthals used fire to cook food, and new studies on stone tools suggest they had the technology to spark fires, too. (In other words, they didn’t just have to chase embers when lightning struck to fuel their hearths.)
Some evidence suggests Neanderthals also had spiritual and ritual practices. Tombs discovered at sites like La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southwestern France show that these archaic humans buried their dead. At another site in France, researchers discovered that Neanderthals descended deep inside a cave and created enigmatic stone circles out of stalagmites 176,000 years ago.
The extent of Neanderthals’ symbolic abilities is still debated; they were alive at the same time as modern humans were creating some of the first abstract and figurative cave art, but few artworks have been attributed to these people. However, in 2018, in a win for the Neanderthals, researchers reported that 65,000-year-old abstract images in Spanish caves must have been created by Neanderthals. (Scientists think that modern humans didn’t get to Western Europe until about 42,000 years ago.)
Based on their bones, we know that Neanderthals were capable of at least making complex sounds. It’s hard to prove that Neanderthals had language because they didn’t leave us any writings (although neither did anatomically modern humans from the same period). But some researchers have argued that they probably did have sophisticated ways of communicating.
What’s more, genetic evidence has shown that modern humans mated with Neanderthals before these individuals disappeared about 40,000 years ago. Many of us today still have 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, findings that suggest that modern humans who encountered these individuals saw them as people, too.
Beginning in the 1930s, revised reconstructions of Neanderthals increasingly emphasized the similarity rather than differences from modern humans. From the 1940s throughout the 1970s, it was increasingly common to use the subspecies classification of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis vs. Homo sapiens sapiens. While we are closely related to the Neanderthals, they are not our direct ancestors. Evidence from the fossil record and genetic data shows they are a distinct species that developed as a side branch in our family tree. Some European Homo heidelbergensis fossils were showing early Neanderthal-like features by about 300,000 years ago and it is likely that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from this species. The name Homo sapiens neanderthalensis was once common when Neanderthals were considered members of our own species, Homo sapiens. This view and name are no-longer favored.
The hypothesis of “multiregional origin” of modern man was formulated in the 1980s on such grounds, arguing for the presence of an unbroken succession of fossil sites in both Europe and Asia. Hybridization between Neanderthals and Cro Magnon had been suggested on skeletal and craniological grounds since the early 20th century, and found increasing support in the later 20th century, until Neanderthal admixture was found to be present in modern populations genetics in the 2010s. In 2010, geneticists announced that interbreeding had likely taken place, a result confirmed in 2012. The genomes of all non-Africans include portions that are of Neanderthal origin, a share estimated in 2014 to 1.5–2.1%. This DNA is absent in Sub-Saharan Africans (Yoruba people and San subjects). Ötzi the iceman, Europe’s oldest preserved mummy, was found to possess an even higher percentage of Neanderthal ancestry. The two percent of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans and Asians is not the same in all Europeans and Asians: in all, approximately 20% of the Neanderthal genome appears to survive in the modern human gene pool.
The quality of stone tools at archaeological sites suggests Neanderthals were good at “expert” cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory. Neanderthal toolmaking changed little over hundreds of thousands of years. The lack of innovation was said to imply they may have had a reduced capacity for thinking by analogy and less working memory. The researchers further speculated that Neanderthal behavior would probably seem neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic to modern humans.
A 2018 open access paper discussed, in light of recent developments in the fields of paleogenetics and paleoanthropology, whether or not Neanderthals were rational. The authors’ argument focuses on the genetic evidence that supports interbreeding with Homo sapiens, language acquisition (including the FOXP2 gene), archaeological signs of cultural development and potential for cumulative cultural evolution.
Neanderthals could have gone extinct due to a slight drop in their fertility rates, a new study finds. The last of the Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, disappeared from Europe about 40,000 years ago. Previous research estimated that at its peak, the entire Neanderthal population in both Europe and Asia was quite small, totaling 70,000 at most. Scientists have long debated whether the dispersal of modern humans across the globe helped kill off Neanderthals, either directly through conflict or indirectly through the spread of disease. (https://www.livescience.com/65594-neanderthal-fertility-led-to-extinction.html)
“The disappearance of the Neanderthal population is an exciting subject — imagine a human group that has lived for thousands of years and is very well-adapted to its environment, and then disappears,” study senior author Silvana Condemi, a paleoanthropologist at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France, told Live Science. “For a long time, it was thought that Homo sapiens had simply killed the Neanderthals. Today, thanks to the results of genetic analysis, we know that the encounters between Neanderthals and sapiens were not always so cruel, and that interbreeding took place — even today’s humans have genes of Neanderthal origin.”
Instead of investigating why the Neanderthals disappeared, “we looked for the ‘how’ of their demise,” Condemi said. Specifically, the scientists generated computer models that explored how Neanderthal populations might decline and go extinct over time in response to a variety of factors, such as war, epidemics and reduced fertility or survival rates among men and women of varying ages.
“Very quickly, we found something unexpected — this disappearance, which occurred over a very long period, cannot be explained by a catastrophic event,” Condemi said. Computer models that assumed modern humans killed off Neanderthals via war or epidemics found that these factors would have driven Neanderthals to extinction far more rapidly than the 4,000 to 10,000 years in the archaeological record during which modern humans and Neanderthals are known to have coexisted in Europe, the researchers said.
The scientists also found that neither an increase in juvenile or adult survival rates, nor a strong decrease in fertility rates, were likely causes for the long decline seen in Neanderthals. Instead, they discovered that Neanderthal extinction was possible within 10,000 years with a 2.7% decrease in fertility rates of young Neanderthal women — first-time mothers less than 20 years old — and within 4,000 years with an 8% decrease in fertility rates in this same group.
“The disappearance of the Neanderthals was probably due to a slight decline in the fertility among the youngest women,” Condemi said. “This is a phenomenon that is limited in scope that, over time, had an impact.”
A variety of factors might have lowered these fertility rates. Condemi noted that pregnancies among young, first-time mothers “are on the average more risky than second or later pregnancies. A minimum of calories is essential for the maintenance of pregnancy, and a reduction of food, and therefore of calories, is detrimental to pregnancy.”
Neanderthals disappeared during a time of climate change. Environmental fluctuations might have led to a slight decrease in food, and in turn “may explain a reduction in fertility,” Condemi said.
Condemi noted that prior work suggested that with modern humans “if the average number of births falls to a level of 1.3 among the women of the world, our species would disappear in 300 years. This is an unlikely model, but the results would be very rapid!”
The scientists detailed their findings online in the journal PLOS ONE.
An alternative to extinction is that Neanderthals were absorbed into the Cro-Magnon population by interbreeding. This would be counter to strict versions of the recent African origin theory, since it would imply that at least part of the genome of Europeans would descend from Neanderthals.
The average Neanderthal brain 21% bigger, some 35 % bigger. Also, some new discoveries in Europe and Asia made me think are Neanderthals more intelligent. The most extreme statement about Neanderthal intelligence I found in a Nature article by Hechet:
“What about correlations coming from the last common ancestor?” That was the safe correlation. Sapiens and Neanderthals had split around 800,000 years ago, so they had to share lots of genes that chimps did not have.
“The genes for red hair and pale skin didn’t match well enough to show a correlation, but I found a correlation for genes linked to other traits. There is a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger’s syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly. I can trace some genes back to the interglacial around 450,000 years ago, and others back to another burst of evolutionary innovation during the Eemian interglacial about 130,000 years ago.”
They weren’t in the modern human genome until Neanderthals interbred with Cro-Magnons between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago.”
“Advanced mathematical processing? Shouldn’t that have been missing from the Neanderthal genome?”
“No, I found that Neanderthals lacked genes linked to successful socialization and management skills. They could count perfectly well, but they couldn’t deal with groups. Socialization genes came from Sapiens.
There is plenty of evidence suggesting Neanderthals were competent, complex, social creatures. Considering their apparent cognitive abilities, theyshould had language. There’s no evidence that Neanderthals developed writing, so language, if it existed, would have been verbal. Unlike writing, spoken languages leave no physical trace behind. Our words vanish as soon as they are spoken.
The best researchers can do is to analyze Neanderthal fossils, artifacts and genes, looking for physical and cognitive traits considered necessary for language. And even after scrutinizing this same body of evidence, experts have come to different conclusions: Some say language is unique to our species, Homo sapiens; others contend Neanderthals also had the gift of gab.
Part of the reason scientists disagree about Neanderthal language is because there are different definitions of language itself. Without straying too far into academic debates over the nature of language, let’s just say there are broad and narrow theories when it comes to what actually constitutes language. A broad view defines language as a communication system in which arbitrary symbols (usually sounds) hold specific meanings, but are not fixed or finite. Words can be invented, learned, altered and combined to convey anything you can think. Proponents of narrow definitions tend to argue that language evolved exclusively in Homo sapiens as recently as 100,000 years ago. With a broader definition, though, it is easier to posit language emerging earlier in our evolutionary history, even among other species of the human family tree.
Speech and language are mostly soft-tissue operations, requiring organs like the tongue, diaphragm and brain that rarely preserve. However, producing and hearing speech influences some enduring aspects of our skeletons too, including the hyoid bone, ear ossicles and the portion of the spinal canal that holds nerves involved in precisely controlling breathing. Studies have found these features are remarkably similar between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, but more primitive and ape-like in earlier hominins like Australopiths. Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants.
To assess if Neanderthals had the brains for language, researchers usually rely on proxies from the archaeological record — artifacts that required the same cognitive prerequisites as language, such as hierarchical organization or abstract symbolic thought. The latter is necessary to encode sounds with meanings and evidenced by artifacts like beads and cave paintings. So did Neanderthals make those things? Maybe. A few cases of Neanderthal ornaments and paintings have been reported, but are so rare that researchers question their authorship and antiquity. However, Neanderthals could have been symbolic in other ways. For instance, at many Neanderthal sites, archaeologists have found butchered wing bones from birds of prey. This could indicate Neanderthals adorned themselves with feathers (which did not preserve) imbued with symbolic meaning.
The newest data thrown into the mix comes from ancient DNA (aDNA). “I find it both the most convincing and the hardest to interpret,” says Dediu, a scientist with the Dynamique du Langage laboratory in Lyon, France. The convincing aspect is that ancient genomes have shown Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred in several periods during the past 200,000 years. Realizing the groups were biologically and behaviorally similar enough to produce successful offspring has helped many anthropologists believe Neanderthals must have been capable of language.
What is harder to determine is whether the differences in DNA between us and them had an effect on language abilities. “We don’t understand very well the genetics of cognitive abilities, the genetics of speech [and] language,” Dediu explains.
Geneticists can compare the genomes of Neanderthals and modern humans, letter-by-letter, or gene-by-gene, but we don’t know how this code confers language ability. Some genes, like FOXP2, are definitely involved, as living people with altered versions experience language impairments. Of the major “language associated” genes thus far identified, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have matching versions. However, some differences have been found in regulatory DNA, which controls where (in which cells), when (during development) and how much putative language genes activate. In sum, DNA may hold answers to Neanderthal language ability, but we don’t yet know how to read it.
The question of Neanderthal language remains an open debate. If they lacked it, language may be unique to Homo sapiens. If they had it, language was likely present at least since Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common ancestor, over 500,000 years ago.
As scholar Sverker Johansson put it, “Once upon a time our ancestors had no language, and today all people do.” Determining Neanderthal language capabilities will help us understand when and how our incredible communicative abilities emerged.
References
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