Neanderthal was no brute

Press, 28 February 1986, Page 12

Neanderthal was no brute

Neanderthal! That derogatory label should be dropped from the name-calling vocabulary of the late twentieth century. The cavemen of the cartoonists, Neanderthals, have been the most maligned and misunderstood of all the early human ancestors.

When the first Neanderthal bones were found in Germany’s Neander Valley in the mid-nine-teenth century no one was prepared for “a primitive skeleton in the human closet.” At that time, virtually everyone assumed that mankind had always had the same form as modern humans. No one had any idea of the vast age of the earth or of the long evolutionary history of hominids (members of the family of man).

In tracing man’s 4 million-year heritage of walking upright, the “National Geographic” science editor, Kenneth F. Weaver, reports that having Neanderthals

on the Homo sapiens family tree would be no disgrace. Despite their backward brutish image, Neanderthals: • Had big brains that, on the average, were even larger than modem man’s and just as well developed. • Were not so different in body, although distinctly more robust, with rather short lower limbs.

• Were the first people known to bury their dead. They may have believed in spirits and perhaps in an afterlife. In a number of the more famous burials, stone tools and other objects were carefully positioned near the bodies. • Were the first humans to move into truly cold climates, enduring miserable winters and taking refuge in caves and rockshelters. Their large brains enabled them to find ways to adapt

to extreme climates.

• Fashioned specialised stone tools and weapons, classified as Mousterian, that were finer and more carefully shaped than those of an earlier species, Homo erectus.

• Had strong social bonds. The skeleton of the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints (France) shows that despite a broken rib, severe hip arthritis, diseased vertebrae, and almost no teeth, he survived until the age of perhaps 40. “dearly his fellows were caring for him...” Weaver writes. “This case and a number of others like it bespeak altruism and a social conscience that one would hardly have expected from Neanderthal “brutes.”

Why the bad reputation? The Neanderthal skeleton was the first fossil hominid discovery to be publicised. The bones found by limestone miners quarrying into a cave near Dusseldorf in

1856, fell into the hands of the local science teacher. He would not have thought in genealogical terms when examining the beetle-browed, low-sloping skullcap, part of a pelvis, and some limb bones.

Rather, he concluded that the remains were those of a refugee from Noah’s flood. Others decided that the creature was “some poor idiotic hermit” a' sufferer from rickets, or a deserter from the Cossack army that had camped nearby during the Napoleonic Wars. This false picture was perpetuated when the nearly complete skeleton of the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints was found in 1908. Marcellin Boule, an authority on fossils who undertook to reconstruct the skeleton, created the image of a hulking dimwitted brute, who shuffled with the bent-knee gait of an ape. Today, with specimens from more than 100 sites, anthropologists have corrected that impression. Relatively large quantities of remains have been found because the Neanderthals buried their dead. But mystery still surrounds these people. They are somewhat difficult to place in time. Neanderthals seem to have appeared in Europe about 125,000 years ago. They disappear — some say quite abruptly — at some time between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. During the relatively short span of about 100,000 years, the Neanderthals spread all across Europe, the Middle East, and western and central Asia. They were contemporaries of other forms of archaic Homo sapiens , found as far away as China and South Africa. The eastern Neanderthal types, such as those from the caves of Tabun and Amud in Israel, not only look somewhat different from the classic European Neanderthals, but they also may have evolved more rapidly. Did the Neanderthals die out or lose out in competition with arriving populations who displaced or absorbed them? “All we know,” Weaver writes, “is that they disappeared and that by 30,000 years ago a robust version of modern humans had replaced them everywhere.” How these anatomically modern humans, whose physical differences from us are too slight to be of much significance, are related to Neanderthals is a matter of much debate.

One thing is clear. “In the light of twentieth century human behaviour we should be carefull,” as one anthropologist cautions, “of whom we call brutish” — or Neanderthal.

—National Geographic News Service