Neanderthals The Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were a separate species, or possibly a race, of ‘archaic’ humans who occupied Europe and the adjacent parts of western Asia from around 300 000 to 30 000 years ago. They probably descended directly from the earlier Homo erectus populations of the same areas. Discoveries of buried skeletal remains (mostly in caves) show that they were heavily built, muscular individuals, with heavy-browed faces, large noses and jaws, and receding chins. They seem to have been adapted partly to survive in the cold conditions of the last two European glacial periods, and partly to a strenuous lifestyle with a much more limited technological repertoire than that of Homo sapiens. Their brains were of similar size to ours (about 1400 ml on average), but could well have been differently organized. They were clearly proficient at the manufacture of quite complex stone tools (mostly from flint, quartzite, and similar rocks) and the production of certain wooden tools, such as spears. But, unlike their Homo sapiens successors, they produced virtually no recognizable tools in bone or antler. Most striking of all is the virtual absence of any evidence for artistic representation, or the use of ‘ornamental’ items, among the Neanderthals. All of this has been interpreted to mean that the Neanderthals had a very limited capacity for ‘symbolic’ or abstract thought, and either no formal language or a significantly simpler form of language than that of modern humans. The disappearance of the Neanderthals around 30 000 years ago was probably due mainly to competition with the rapidly expanding populations of anatomically and behaviourally ‘modern’ humans (Homo sapiens), which seem, from recent studies of DNA patterns, to have originated and dispersed from Africa shortly before this time. A sample of mitochondrial DNA recovered from bones of an original Neanderthal skeleton (found near Dusseldorf in Germany) is so different from that of modern Europeans that it suggests that there was very little if any interbreeding between the ‘native’ Neanderthal populations of Europe and the new, intrusive Homo sapiens. However, a few skeletons have been found that have been claimed to show a mixture of Neanderthal and modern features — as in the case of a recently-discovered skeleton from Lagar Velho in Portugal. Periods of overlap between the Neanderthals and modern humans of up to 5 000 years have been documented in some areas of Europe, during which the final Neanderthals apparently adopted or copied some features of more ‘modern’ behaviour.

Paul Mellars

Bibliography

Mellars, P. (1996). The Neanderthal legacy: an archaeological perspective from Western Europe. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

See also evolution, human.