The details about Neanderthal behaviour remain highly controversial. From their physiology, Neanderthals are presumed to have been omnivores, but animal protein formed the majority of their dietary protein, showing them to have been carnivorous apex predators and not scavengers. [1] Although very little is known of their social organization, it appears patrilines would make up the nucleus of the tribe, and women would seek out partners in neighbouring tribes once reaching adolescence, presumably to avoid inbreeding. [2] An analysis based on finger-length ratios suggests that Neanderthals were more sexually competitive and promiscuous than modern-day humans. [3]
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. [4] Neanderthal toolmaking changed little over hundreds of thousands of years. The lack of innovation may imply a reduced capacity for thinking by analogy and less working memory. Researchers have speculated that Neanderthal behaviour would probably seem neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic to modern humans, [4] [5] but nevertheless having a considerable degree of rationality. [6] There is genetic evidence that supports interbreeding with Homo sapiens, language capability (including the FOXP2 gene), archaeological signs of cultural development and potential for cumulative cultural evolution. [7] Few Neanderthals lived past the age of 35. [8]
It is not known whether Neanderthals were anatomically capable of speech and whether they spoke. [9] The only bone in the vocal tract is the hyoid, but it is so fragile that no Neanderthal hyoid was found until 1983, when excavators discovered a well-preserved one on Neanderthal Kebara 2, Israel. It was largely similar to that of living humans. Although the original excavators claimed that the similarity of this bone with that of living humans implied Neanderthals were anatomically capable of speech, [10] it is not possible to reconstruct the vocal tract with information supplied by the hyoid. [11] [12] [13] [14] In particular, it does not allow to determine if the larynx of its owner was in a low-lying position, a feature considered important in producing speech. [15] [16]
A 2013 study on the Kebara hyoid used X-ray microtomography and finite element analysis to conclude that the Neanderthal hyoid showed microscopic features more similar to a modern human's hyoid than to a chimpanzee hyoid. To the authors, that suggested the Neanderthal hyoid was used similarly to that in living humans, that is, to produce speech. [17] Because the authors did not compare the microscopic structure of the Kebara 2 hyoid with that of speech-hindered living humans, the result is not yet conclusive.[ citation needed ]
Although some researchers think Neanderthal tool-making is too complex for them not to have had language, [18] tool-making experiments of Levallois technology, the most common Neanderthal toolmaking technique, have found that living humans can learn it in silence. [19]
Neanderthals had the same DNA-coding region of the FOXP2 gene as living humans, but are different in one position of the gene's regulatory regions, [20] and the extent of FOXP2 expression might hence have been different in Neanderthals. [21] Although the gene appears necessary for language, it is not sufficient. [22] It is not known whether FOXP2 evolved for or in conjunction with language, nor whether there are other language-related genes that Neanderthals may or may not have had. Similarly, the size and functionality of the Neanderthal Broca's and Wernicke's areas, used for speech generation in modern humans, is debated.
In 1998, researchers suggested Neanderthals had a hypoglossal canal at least as large as humans, suggesting they had part of the neurological requirements for language. The canal carries the hypoglossal nerve, which controls the muscles of the tongue, necessary to produce language. [23] However, a Berkeley research team showed no correlation between canal size and speech, as several extant non-human primates and fossilized australopithecines have larger hypoglossal canals. [24]
The morphology of the outer and middle ear of Homo heidelbergensis , the Neanderthal's ancestor, suggests they had an auditory sensitivity similar to modern humans and different from chimpanzees. [25]
Neanderthal and early anatomically modern human archaeological sites show a simpler toolkit than those found in Upper Paleolithic sites, produced by modern humans after about 50,000 BP. In both early anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals, there is little innovation in the technology. In 2020 a 50,000-year-old three-ply cord fragment made from bark was found at the Abri du Maras, France site. Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College, Ohio, concluded that the creation of the cord suggested a cognitive understanding of numeracy and context-sensitive operational memory. [26]
Tools produced by Middle Palaeolithic humans in Eurasia (both Neanderthals and early modern humans) are known as Mousterian. These were often produced using soft hammer percussion, with hammers made of materials like bones, antlers, and wood, rather than hard hammer percussion, using stone hammers. A result of this is that their bone industry was relatively simple. They routinely made stone implements. Neanderthal tools consisted of stone flakes and task-specific hand axes, many of which were sharp.
There is evidence of violence among Neanderthals. The 40,000-year-old Neanderthal skull of St. Césaire has a healed fracture in its cranial vault likely caused by something sharp, suggesting interpersonal violence. The wound healed and the Neanderthal survived. [27]
Whether they had projectile weapons is controversial. They seem to have had wooden spears, but it is unclear whether they were used as projectiles or as thrusting spears. [28] Wood implements rarely survive, [29] but several 320,000-year-old wooden spears about 2 metres in length were found near Schöningen, northern Germany, and are thought to be the product of the older Homo heidelbergensis species.
Neanderthals used fire on occasion, but it is not certain whether they were able to produce it. They may have used pyrolusite (manganese dioxide) to accelerate the combustion of wood. "With archaeological evidence for fireplaces and the conversion of the manganese dioxide to powder, [it has been argued] that Neanderthals at Pech-de-l’Azé I used manganese dioxide in fire-making and produced fire on demand." MnO2 lowers the combustion temperature of wood from 350 degrees Celsius to 250 degrees Celsius and is common in Neanderthal archaeological sites. [30]
Neanderthals produced birch tar through the dry distillation of birch bark. [31] [32] It was long thought that birch tar made by Neanderthals required them to follow a complex recipe and that it thus showed complex cognitive skills (to arrive at this recipe) and cultural transmission (of this recipe). A study from 2019 showed that birch tar production can instead be a very simple process - merely involving the burning of birch bark near smooth vertical surfaces in open-air conditions. [33]
Pendants and other jewellery showing traces of ochre dye and deliberate grooving have also been found in one single stratigraphically disturbed Neanderthal archaeological layer, [34] but whether these items were ever in the hands of Neanderthals or were mixed into their archaeological layers from overlying modern human ones is debated.
No claim of a deliberate Neanderthal burial is universally accepted. [35] [36] [37] An interpretation of pre-Neanderthal Shanidar IV as having been ritually buried with flowers [38] was seriously questioned in the past, [39] and to Paul B. Pettitt, convincingly eliminated: "A recent examination of the microfauna from the strata into which the grave was cut suggests that the pollen was deposited by the burrowing rodent Meriones tersicus (Persian jird), which is common in the Shanidar microfauna and whose burrowing activity can be observed today". [40]
However, further excavations of the site which began in 2014 led to new discoveries and multiple lines of evidence that the Neanderthal was deliberately buried, including the fact that the sediment layer around the body is visibly different to the layer below. Additionally, the sediment below the body shows signs of having been disturbed by digging. According to Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge, "That’s quite good evidence that something was dug out and that’s what the body’s been put in." [41]
Neanderthals obtained protein in their diet from animal sources. [42] Evidence-based isotope studies show that Neanderthals ate primarily meat. [43] [44] [45] Neanderthals were probably apex predators, [46] and fed predominantly on deer, namely red deer and reindeer, as they were the most abundant game, [47] but also on ibex, wild boar, aurochs, and less frequently mammoth, straight-tusked elephant and woolly rhinoceros. [48] [49] [50]
Traces of fossilized plants have been extracted from Neanderthal teeth tartar found in Belgium and Iraq, suggesting they also consumed plants. [51] [52] [53]
Burned food remnants, thought to be about 70,000 years old, were found in the Shanidar Caves, 500 miles north of Baghdad. Dr Ceren Kabukcu, an archaeobotanist at the University of Liverpool said, "We present evidence for the first time of soaking and pounding pulse seeds by both Neanderthals and early modern humans." [54]
Neanderthals are thought to have practised cannibalism or ritual defleshing. This hypothesis was formulated after researchers found marks on Neanderthal bones similar to the bones of a dead deer butchered by Neanderthals. [55] [56]
Neanderthal bones from various sites (Combe-Grenal and Abri Moula in France, Krapina in Croatia and Grotta Guattari in Italy) have all been cited as bearing cut marks made by stone tools. [57] However, the results of technological tests have revealed varied causes.
Re-evaluation of these marks using high-powered microscopes, comparisons to contemporary butchered animal remains, and recent ethnographic cases of excarnation mortuary practises have shown that perhaps this was a case of ritual defleshing.
Evidence of cannibalism includes:
Evidence indicating cannibalism would not distinguish Neanderthals from modern humans, which are known to have practised both cannibalism and mortuary defleshing (e.g., the sky burial of Tibet).
A large number of claims of Neanderthal art, adornment, and structures have been made, which would show Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought and a degree of human rationality. [62] [63] [64] [65] However, none of them are widely accepted as evidence of symbolism, [66] as the dating often interlaps with anatomically modern human presence in Europe. [67] [68] Some notable findings are listed below.
Early modern human (EMH), or anatomically modern human (AMH), are terms used to distinguish Homo sapiens that are anatomically consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans, from extinct archaic human species. This distinction is useful especially for times and regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe. Among the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens are those found at the Omo-Kibish I archaeological site in south-western Ethiopia, dating to about 233,000 to 196,000 years ago, the Florisbad site in South Africa, dating to about 259,000 years ago, and the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, dated about 315,000 years ago.
Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site on Bradost Mountain, within the Zagros Mountains in the Erbil Governorate of Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. Neanderthal remains were discovered here in 1953, including Shanidar 1, who survived several injuries, possibly due to care from others in his group, and Shanidar 4, the famed 'flower burial'. Until this discovery, Cro-Magnons, the earliest known H. sapiens in Europe, were the only individuals known for purposeful, ritualistic burials.
Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Hypotheses on the causes of the extinction include violence, transmission of diseases from modern humans which Neanderthals had no immunity to, competitive replacement, extinction by interbreeding with early modern human populations, natural catastrophes, climate change and inbreeding depression. It is likely that multiple factors caused the demise of an already low population.
Erik Trinkaus is an American paleoanthropologist specializing in Neandertal and early modern human biology and human evolution. Trinkaus researches the evolution of the species Homo sapiens and recent human diversity, focusing on the paleoanthropology and emergence of late archaic and early modern humans, and the subsequent evolution of anatomically modern humanity. Trinkaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor Emeritus of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS One, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and the Journal of Human Evolution and has written/co-written or edited/co-edited fifteen books in paleoanthropology. He is frequently quoted in the popular media.
The Neanderthal genome project is an effort of a group of scientists to sequence the Neanderthal genome, founded in July 2006.
The Sidrón Cave is a non-carboniferous limestone karst cave system located in the Piloña municipality of Asturias, northwestern Spain, where Paleolithic rock art and the fossils of more than a dozen Neanderthals were found. Declared a "Partial Natural Reserve" in 1995, the site also serves as a retreat for five species of bats and is the place of discovery of two species of Coleoptera (beetles).
The Grotte du Renne is one of the many caves at Arcy-sur-Cure in France, an archaeological site of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic period in the Yonne departement, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. It contains Châtelperronian lithic industry and Neanderthal remains. Grotte du Renne has been argued to provide the best evidence that Neanderthals developed aspects of modern behaviour before contact with modern humans, but this has been challenged by radiological dates, which suggest mixing of later human artifacts with Neanderthal remains. However, it has also been argued that the radiometric dates have been affected by post-recovery contamination, and statistical testing suggests the association between Neanderthal remains, Châtelperronian artefacts and personal ornaments is genuine, not the result of post-depositional processes.
The oldest undisputed examples of figurative art are known from Europe and from Sulawesi, Indonesia, and are dated as far back as around 50,000 years ago . Together with religion and other cultural universals of contemporary human societies, the emergence of figurative art is a necessary attribute of full behavioral modernity.
Vindija Cave is an archaeological site associated with Neanderthals and modern humans, located in the municipality of Donja Voća, northern Croatia. Remains of three Neanderthals were selected as the primary sources for the first draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome project in 2010. Additional research was done on the samples and published in 2017.
The multiregional hypothesis, multiregional evolution (MRE), or polycentric hypothesis, is a scientific model that provides an alternative explanation to the more widely accepted "Out of Africa" model of monogenesis for the pattern of human evolution.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins(də-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, and lived, based on current evidence, from 285 to 25 thousand years ago. Denisovans are known from few physical remains; consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. No formal species name has been established pending more complete fossil material.
Neanderthals are an extinct group of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. The type specimen, Neanderthal 1, was found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in present-day Germany.
Neanderthal anatomy differed from modern humans in that they had a more robust build and distinctive morphological features, especially on the cranium, which gradually accumulated more derived aspects, particularly in certain isolated geographic regions. This robust build was an effective adaptation for Neanderthals, as they lived in the cold environments of Europe. In which they also had to operate in Europe's dense forest landscape that was extremely different from the environments of the African grassland plains that Homo sapiens adapted to with a different anatomical build.
Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans occurred during the Middle Paleolithic and early Upper Paleolithic. The interbreeding happened in several independent events that included Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as several unidentified hominins.
Mezmaiskaya Cave is a prehistoric cave site overlooking the right bank of the Sukhoi Kurdzhips in the southern Russian Republic of Adygea, located in the northwestern foothills of the North Caucasus in the Caucasus Mountains system.
Scladina, or Sclayn Cave, is an archaeological site located in Wallonia in the town of Sclayn, in the Andenne hills in Belgium, where excavations since 1978 have provided the material for an exhaustive collection of over thirteen thousand Mousterian stone artifacts and the fossilized remains of an especially ancient Neanderthal, called the Scladina child were discovered in 1993.
Southwest Asian Neanderthals were Neanderthals who lived in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran - the southernmost expanse of the known Neanderthal range. Although their arrival in Asia is not well-dated, early Neanderthals occupied the region apparently until about 100,000 years ago. At this time, Homo sapiens migration seem to have replaced them in one of the first anatomically-modern expansions out of Africa. In their turn, starting around 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals seem to have returned and replaced Homo sapiens in Southwest Asia. They inhabited the region until about 55,000 years ago.
The Goyet Caves are a series of connected caves located in Belgium in a limestone cliff about 15 m (50 ft) above the river Samson near the village of Mozet in the Gesves municipality of the Namur province. The site is a significant locality of regional Neanderthal and European early modern human occupation, as thousands of fossils and artifacts were discovered that are all attributed to a long and contiguous stratigraphic sequence from 120,000 years ago, the Middle Paleolithic to less than 5,000 years ago, the late Neolithic. A robust sequence of sediments was identified during extensive excavations by geologist Edouard Dupont, who undertook the first probings as early as 1867. The site was added to the Belgian National Heritage register in 1976.
Kebara 2 is a 61,000 year-old Levantine Neanderthal mid-body male skeleton. It was discovered in 1983 by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Baruch Arensburg, and Bernard Vandermeersch in a Mousterian layer of Kebara Cave, Israel. To the excavators, its disposition suggested it had been deliberately buried, though like every other putative Middle Palaeolithic intentional burial, this has been questioned.
Krapina Neanderthal site, also known as Hušnjakovo Hill is a Paleolithic archaeological site located near Krapina, Croatia.