Giving Neandertals their due: similarities with modern humans shift the image of the caveman brute.

Similarities with modern humans shift the image of the caveman brute

Since 1856, when a thick-browed, humanlike skull turned up in Germany's Neander valley, the ancient people known as Neandertals have suffered a less-than-flattering reputation.

A 19th-century anatomist described Neandertals as "benighted" members of the genus Homo. Their muscled bodies and simple tools contributed to their image as the brutish cousins of the human family.

Most researchers do credit Neandertals with being well-adapted creatures who survived the cold climate of Europe long before the appearance of modern humans, H. sapiens. Some anthropologists consider Neandertals a regional variant of modern humans, who most scholars believe evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Many, however, see them as a separate species and doubt that they shared H. sapiens' newly sophisticated behaviors. Although Neandertals' brains were roughly the same size as those of modern people, they often have been portrayed as lacking the language skills, foresight, creativity, and other cognitive abilities of modern humans.

In this view, the simpler ways of Neandertals marked them for extinction after modern humans--the makers of cave paintings and more advanced tools--arrived in Western Europe about 40,000 years ago. By 30,000 years ago, Neandertals had vanished.

"That tends to predispose people to thinking about them in one specific kind of way, as the loser," says John J. Shea of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.

In recent years, however, research has begun to cast a more complimentary light on the older cousins. This emerging view depicts Neandertals as having a capacity for creative, flexible behavior somewhat like that of modern people. For example, although some anthropologists have argued that Neandertals showed limited prowess as hunters, German archaeologists in 1997 reported finding a trio of aerodynamic wooden spears that they concluded ancestors of Neandertals made 400,000 years ago (SN: 3/1/97, p. 134).

Studies published in a supplement to the June Current Anthropology offer further support for polishing the Neandertal's image. Researchers from France and Portugal report that Neandertals occupying a French cave developed their own, relatively sophisticated ornaments and tools, distinct from those of their modern-human neighbors. Two other studies challenge the view that Neandertals could not hunt effectively and had to survive by scavenging the leftovers of animal predators.

Other scientists have disputed aspects of the new studies. But many say that the emerging evidence may help researchers find possibly subtle differences between modern human and Neandertal cultures that can explain why one flowered and the other vanished.

"We can make [Neandertals] more like us in some respects, but that's not saying they were like us in all respects," says Christopher B. Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Although he views Neandertals as a separate species, he says, studies like the one from France "narrow the gap."

Today's fashion magazines demonstrate how modern people use earrings, necklaces, and other body ornaments to attract mates and communicate status. Scientists say this behavior has a surprisingly long history.

The 1996 discovery in a French cave of a Neandertal fossil lying next to pierced animal teeth, probably worn as pendants, and ivory rings may extend the history of finery back to before modern man. Investigators had seen similar methods of working bone, ivory, and stone, a style called Chatelperronian, in other French caves and dated it to between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago. The style is considered a hybrid of the shaped stones made by Neandertals and the more stylized bone and ivory crafted by early modern humans.

Some scientists have argued that the Neandertals did not invent the Stone Age equivalent of jewelry on their own. They have proposed that Neandertals flattered their newly arrived modern-human neighbors by imitating their more glamorous style of personal adornments, called Aurignacian.

The scientists who made the 1996 finding--Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris and his colleagues--suggested that Neandertals traded with modern humans, much as New World people bartered with colonial Europeans before becoming subjugated. Other scientists have suggested that the Neandertals picked up ornaments from abandoned Aurignacian sites.

These ideas are disputed by Joao Zilhao of the University of Lisbon in Portugal and his French colleagues in the June Current Anthropology. They analyzed other ornaments and tools from the cave that yielded the 1996 discovery, the Grotte du Renne in Arcy-sur-Cure, near Auxerre, France.

They argue that Neandertals probably made Chatelperronian-style ornaments at Arcy-sur-Cure, using methods and materials quite different from those of the Aurignacian style attributed to modern humans.

The evidence from Grotte du Renne so far does not clearly suggest that either culture directly affected the other, the authors say. But they contend that even if Aurignacians influenced the Chatelperronians, these Neandertals independently reinterpreted the newcomers' fashions and tools.

Both the Chatelperronians and Aurignacians probably wore pendants as a sort of social badge, just as modern people do, the authors suggest. So if the Neandertals made their own pendants, they must have understood symbolism, says one of the researchers, Francesco d'Errico of the Institute of the Prehistory and Geology of the Quaternary in Talence, France.

"We do not know whether Neanderthals developed the use of symbols independently or as a consequence of cultural contacts with anatomically modern humans," d'Errico told Science News. "What we know is that their way of using symbols was not qualitatively different from that of anatomically modern humans, which contradicts the hypothesis of their cognitive inferiority.

"The Neandertal was not so different from us from a cognitive point of view," he says. "We look at ourselves as the only species which is able to... produce symbols. But it seems that we are not alone."

D'Errico and his colleagues would even flip the established hierarchy, proposing the novel idea that Neandentals may have taught modern humans how to make some objects. Anthropologists who rule out that possibility suffer from anti-Neandertal prejudice, d'Errico says.

"I think if people look at future archaeological discoveries without wishful thinking, they'll look at it as an interaction between two human populations," he says.

In a commentary accompanying tine article by d'Errico and his colleagues, anthropologist Randall White of New York University argues that artifacts in Chatelperronian sites across Europe show similarities to the Aurignacian style, and ornaments are rare. He suggests that Aurignacians influenced Chatelperronian culture and disputes d'Errico's conclusion that Chatelperronian culture is older than Aurignacian. Both agree that the artifacts need to be dated more accurately.

Other critics point to the timing of Chatelperronian production.

"Why, after over 200,000 years of lacking these behavioral features, should Neanderthals suddenly--and independently--have invented these features at almost precisely the point when anatomically modern populations were expanding across Europe?" says archaeologist Paul Mellars of Cambridge University in England in a separate commentary in the same issue.

Artifacts of the two styles have been found at sites across Europe, but it's still unclear whether only Neandertals made Chatelperronian objects and only modern humans made Aurignacian items.

In addition, the quantity of symbolic artifacts associated with Neandertals simply doesn't match that of the early modern humans, says Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He maintains that Neandertals did not regularly use symbols. "We're not discriminating against them to say they were not like Homo sapiens."

Prejudiced or not, the traditional view of Neandertals questions their sophistication in many areas of life, from tool making to meal planning. Many anthropologists have assumed that these early people could not stock their own larders but had to rely on the leftovers of others.

Studies of animal bones from European caves have concluded that Neandertals probably obtained animal flesh primarily by scavenging prey killed by carnivores, such as wolves. Most of these bones came from the heads or feet of prey animals, which contain little meat. According to this view, the absence of bones from the limbs--the meatiest part--indicates that predators killed the prey and consumed the best flesh, leaving the scraps to the Neandertals.

Interpreting piles of bones is a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, though, and in another paper in the June Current Anthropology, researchers contend that these studies have overlooked the most important pieces.

Archaeologist Curtis W. Marean of SUNY-Stony Brook, who worked with the late Soo Yeun Kim, reports that they painstakingly reassembled a collection of bones from Kobeh Cave, about 300 kilometers west of Tehran, Iran. The type of tools found in the cave suggest that Neandertals lived there more than 40,000 years ago.

The investigators concentrated on fragments from the middle of limb shafts. At other sites, researchers have often discarded such fragments because they don't help to identify species of prey.

By piecing together more than 3,000 shaft fragments over 3 years, Marean and his colleagues assembled specimens they say constitute individual upper and lower leg bones of animals. They then analyzed marks left on the assembled items by breaking, cutting, and biting.

The researchers found on the once-meat-laden bone shafts a pattern that they say is consistent with an emphasis on hunting--a high concentration of break and cut marks, indicative of human butchering, but relatively few animal bite marks. Marean and Kim suggest that people stripped the bones and cracked them open to obtain marrow.

This is the first such detailed reconstruction of bone fragments from any site, and similar work needs to be done at other sites to establish whether Neandertals elsewhere primarily hunted for meat, Marean says.

The report drew praise from several other archaeologists in the June Current Anthropology, but most of them worried that such an approach would burden researchers with thousands of hours of perhaps unnecessary work.

"Completely refitting hundreds of thousands of shaft fragments from every... site is an expense not yet warranted by the evidence," says anthropologist Mary C. Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson. She used less labor-intensive methods to judge the prevalence of limb shaft fragments in Italian caves. Contrary to what Marean and Kim found in the Iranian cave, her evidence indicates that Neandertals scavenged extensively, Stiner says.

Not only did Neandertals hunt regularly in the Near East, they crafted a varied arsenal, including deadly stone-tipped spears that they used to kill certain kinds of elusive prey. So says a third study in the June Current Anthropology. It challenges the idea of Neandertals as hidebound simpletons less adaptable than modern humans.

Shea studied stone points from 58 caves in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan. Both Neandertals and modern humans lived in the Near East before 40,000 years ago, and both groups probably used these same, relatively simple tools as tips of hunting spears, Shea argues.

He reports a significant variation among the sites, both those inhabited by Neandertals and those by modern humans, in the number of tips produced from cores of rock. He suggests this disparity is linked to the type of prey hunted.

Hunters needed stone-tipped spears to kill certain kinds of animals, such as wild horses and ibex, says Shea. These animals ranged widely but followed predictable migration routes. Hunters had limited opportunities to kill them and thus needed to carry their most lethal spears when stalking them. This kind of planned pursuit is called intercept hunting.

In contrast, hunters probably used spears with sharpened wood ends to go after less predictable prey, such as deer and boar, he says. Being more quickly made than stone-tipped spears, the wood-tipped speares would allow hunters more time to look for these quarries.

Of the sites studied by Shea that contained stone tips, only five have yielded fossils of Neandertals or modern humans. He found that the two groups showed similar variation in how many points were produced from a rock.

Anthropologists have assumed that only modern humans typically engaged in intercept hunting, but Shea suggests that his data indicate that Neandertals did too. This contradicts the idea that Neandertals were markedly inferior, he says.

Surprisingly, the Neandertals' efficiency at producing stone spear tips tended to be high--up to 28 times that of the early modern humans.

"I often tell my students these guys [Neandertals] were probably like wolves with knives," Shea says. "They were big people .... They probably required enormous amounts of calories to subsist."

Critics challenge the accuracy of Shea's method of calculating the efficiency of stone-point production and suggest that differences in the distribution of stone points do not necessarily suggest variable hunting styles.

After analyzing the same data, Steven E. Churchill of Duke University in Durham, N.C., says in a Current Anthropology commentary that the variation in production does not correlate with the locations of migrating prey, as it should if Shea's thesis is correct.

Shea responds that fossils of such species have not been preserved or studied sufficiently to reveal whether or not any correlation exists.

Shea's explanation may not be complete, says Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "But I think his approach needs to be very much commended for trying to get at things that are behaviorally and adaptively important," he adds. "It may be that the traditional ways that people have looked at animal bones and stone tools may not tell us much."

Taken together, the studies leave researchers with many further mysteries to consider. Archaeological evidence for similarities between Neandertal and modern human behavior does not jibe with their distinct anatomies, which suggest to some researchers that the groups would have evolved different lifestyles.

Many investigators now agree that anatomical differences alone cannot explain the Neandertals' fate. But if the two groups' behaviors were similar, why did Neandertals disappear?

By suggesting new avenues of research, the recent studies may help scientists better understand what factors decided this ancient family struggle for survival.

"I think what other people should do is pretend [they] don't know Neandertals became extinct," Shea says. "Because it's just as likely that the end of the Neandertals was being driven by some fundamental change in what modern humans were doing than by some intrinsic flaw in Neandertal behavior."