For generations, Neanderthals have been a source of fascination for scientists. This species of ancient hominim inhabited the world for around 500,000 years until they suddenly disappeared around 40,000 years ago. Today, the cause of their extinction remains a mystery.
Archaeologist
Ludovic Slimak and his team have spent three decades excavating caves, studying
ancient artefacts and delving into the world of Neanderthals – and they’ve
recently published provocative new findings. In this week’s episode of The
Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Slimak about how Neanderthals lived,
what happened to them, and why their extinction might hold profound insights
into the story of our own species, Homo Sapiens.
Neanderthals
migrated to Europe around 400,000 years ago from Africa, the birthplace of
humanity. Until now, the general consensus among archaeologists has been that
Homo Sapiens were a lot slower to leave Africa, only migrating to Europe
approximately 42,000 years ago and in one wave that coincided with the
extinction of Neanderthals.
But Slimak,
an archaeologist at Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier in France, has
published controversial new work that challenges this.
In 2022, he
published research from the Mandrin Grotte in the Rhône valley in southern
France, which suggested he’d found a Homo Sapiens tooth within Neanderthal
sediment layers. He explains:
“”We began to work in the middle of these
layers that were dated at 54,000 years, and then we began to find incredibly
modern Homo Sapiens technologies sandwiched between very classic Neanderthal
technologies.”
Slimak’s
subsequent research suggests that, rather than a single wave of Homo Sapiens
migration from west Asia to Europe, there were in fact three waves, the last of
which happened around 42,000 years ago. These findings are provocative: they
would rewrite the timeline to suggest that Homo Sapiens arrived in Europe about
10,000 years earlier than previously thought, and so co-existed with
Neanderthals for much longer.
What tools reveal
To
understand the factors that led to the extinction of Neanderthals and the
survival and dominance of Homo Sapiens, Slimak has also compared the tools
crafted by both species during the period they co-inhabited Europe. His
hypothesis is that examining the evolution of these tools and how they’re made
might provide clues into the differing fates of the two human species.
“If you
take Homo Sapiens tools or weapons technology, after you’ve seen a hundred of
these tools, they are precisely the same. So, we have a process of
standardisation, of production in series that is very specific to our species.
But now, if you take Neanderthal tools … each of them will be different from
the others. That is systematic among all Neanderthal societies.”
Slimak
argues that Homo Sapiens’ disposition for systematisation and standardisation
might have conferred an evolutionary advantage during that period. It wasn’t a
matter of Homo Sapiens wiping out other human species such as Neanderthals.
Rather, their efficient ways may have played an pivotal role in their survival.
To find out
more, listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
A tooth
that rewrites history? The discovery challenging what we knew about
Neanderthals – podcast. By Mend Mariwany. The Conversation, October 12, 2023.
Neanderthals:
what their extinction could tell us about Homo Sapiens. The Conversation Weekly, October 12, 2023,
They were
long derided as knuckle-draggers, but new discoveries are setting the record
straight. As we rethink the nature of the Neanderthals, we could also learn
something about our own humanity
There’s a
human type we’ve all met: people who find a beleaguered underdog to stick up
for. Sometimes, the underdog is an individual – a runt of a boxer, say.
Sometimes, it is a nation, threatened by a larger neighbour or by the rising
sea. Sometimes, it is a tribe of Indigenous people whose land and health are
imperilled. Sometimes, it is a language down to its last native speakers. The
underdog needn’t be human: there are species of insect, even of fungi, that
have their advocates. But what all these cases all have in common is that the
objects of concern are still alive, if only just. The point of the advocacy is
to prevent their extinction. But what if it’s too late? Can there be advocates
for the extinct?
The past
few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of
human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: “Neanderthals”. They died out, it
appears, 40,000 years ago. That number – 40,000 – is as totemic to Neanderthal
specialists as that better known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.
In
speculative fiction by HG Wells, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton,
William Golding, and even, improbably, William Shatner, the Neanderthals have
tended to be either brutes or hippies, savages or shamans. A band formed in the
1990s called the Neanderthals was best known for singing crude songs in animal
skins. A critic once used the phrase “Neanderthal TV” to refer to television
for laddish yobs. The fact that we need no explanation for that reference
indicates just how widespread the stereotype is.
Dimitra
Papagianni and Michael A Morse, authors of a fascinating recent survey of
Neanderthal science, The Neanderthals Rediscovered, write in the hope that they
might “restore some dignity to those we replaced”. But what could they mean?
Since there are no Neanderthals around any more, the fight for Neanderthal
dignity risks seeming not merely quixotic but absurd. What does it take to be
indignant on behalf of the dead – no longer here to care much, if they ever
did, for their own dignity?
Some basic
facts about the Neanderthals are now pretty well settled. Of the many species
of hominin, they were the dominant ones from roughly 400,000 years ago until
40,000 years ago. (Hominin is the now orthodox scientific term for any member
of the genus Homo: a group of species that includes all human-like creatures
but excludes, for instance, gorillas.) Their brains were large, their physical
strength considerable. Remains of their bodies have been found scattered widely
across Europe, even as far south as Gibraltar. Why they aren’t still around
remains a vexed question. There are plenty of plausible hypotheses – and
conjectures galore about their psychology and behaviour – but nothing yet
approaching a consensus.
Our
conjectures about the Neanderthals began in 1856, when workers in a limestone
quarry near Düsseldorf discovered a cave full of bones, some of abnormal bulk.
A local naturalist, with uncanny intuition, thought the bones had to be from a
primitive kind of human. He sent them in a chaperoned wooden box to an
anatomist in Bonn, who inspected them and came to the same conclusion. In 1863,
Prof William King, delivering a short paper to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, argued forcefully that the bones belonged to a creature
for whom we didn’t yet have a name. He went on to propose one: Homo
neanderthalensis.
Why that
name? The valley where the bones were discovered had been a favourite spot for
the wanderings of a 17th-century polymath and nature-lover whose family name
had originally been Neumann, before his ancestors rechristened themselves,
faux-classically, Neander. “Neander” was Greek for “new man”, “Thal” was German
for valley. The Valley of the New Man: “Could there be any more fitting moniker
for the place where we first discovered another kind of human?” asks Rebecca
Wragg Sykes, the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
The
discovery of those bones, and their naming in 1863, came at a time when Europe
was coming to terms with the implications of the theories of Charles Darwin. On
the Origin of Species had been published only four years earlier, and it was
becoming harder to deny that the world was older – dramatically older – than we
had supposed.
That name,
Homo neanderthalensis, did two things at once. It proposed that we, proud members
of Homo sapiens, had not always been the only members of our genus. But the
kinship it acknowledged in one breath, it took away from the Neanderthal in the
other. Even if they were human, Neanderthals were humans of a distinct type.
They were like us; indeed, they were rather more like us than the chimpanzees
that we were beginning to acknowledge as our kindred. But they were still
other. Perhaps that was the beginning of the denial of the Neanderthals’
dignity against which their 21st-century champions so bridle.
The fossil
record was already beginning to show us how different a place the world of the
mid-19th century was from the one that the Neanderthals inhabited. There were
animals then that are no longer with us: enormous grazing cattle named aurochs,
straight-tusked elephants, woolly rhinoceros, and the great auk, a giant
penguin-like bird that died out around the time of the discoveries in the
Neander valley.
That world,
barely a blink of an eye in geological time, was, as Wragg Sykes puts it with
sincere excitement, “sparkling with hominins”: Homo antecessor, Homo bodoensis,
Homo heidelbergensis, many of which inhabited the Earth during the very same
periods. There are at least a half dozen now that are widely recognised, and
more seem to be discovered all the time.
The
Neanderthals have been joined, much more recently, for instance, by such
species as Homo floresiensis, irritatingly referred to as “hobbits” after the
discovery of a diminutive skeleton in Indonesia in 2003. In 2010, we got
decisive proof of the Denisovans, another hominin, in Siberia. In the years
since, the hominin ranks have swelled yet further to include Homo naledi (South
Africa) and Homo luzonensis (the Philippines). No one doubts that further
archaeological work, particularly in Africa, will yield yet more hominins. But
the parade of archaic humans all began with the most popular of our fellow
hominins: the Neanderthals.
The most
recent defence of Neanderthal dignity to appear in English is The Naked
Neanderthal by the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak. He reports
encountering an anthropologist at Stanford who joked, while projecting a slide
of a Neanderthal skull, that “if I got on a plane and saw that the pilot had a
head like that, I’d get off again”. Blunter still was the Russian academic who
kept insisting that the Neanderthals were, simply “different”. Different how?
“Ludovic,” he said, “they have no soul.”
What
exactly is that supposed to mean? Dragged out of the realm of idle metaphor,
the Russian scientist must have been saying that there were psychological
capacities that we, Homo sapiens, have – capacities distinctive of our humanity
– that Homo neanderthalensis lacked. But what were they? That is a scientific
question, to be answered by research, not simply a matter for philosophical
speculation.
It is
beyond doubt now that the knuckle-dragging stereotype of the Neanderthal was
based on a crude mistake. Marcellin Boule, a French pioneer in the subject, has
much to answer for: faced with a well-preserved specimen from a French cave in
1908, he chose to reconstruct, for no obvious scientific reason, its legs and
spine as stooped. A widely circulated illustration of a reconstructed body
depicting the Neanderthal as more ape-like than recognisably human set the tone
for the popular misunderstanding of Neanderthals: inarticulate, slouching,
slow; therefore other; therefore inferior.
Like other
champions of the Neanderthals’ dignity, the evolutionary biologist Clive
Finlayson, author of The Smart Neanderthal and The Humans Who Went Extinct, was
exasperated by the cultural influence of Boule’s scientifically groundless
reconstruction. Armed with better-preserved skulls and fewer assumptions about
the inferiority of the Neanderthals, he was in a position to show why our anatomical
differences from Neanderthals have been overstated. In 2016, he went so far as
to commission a pair of forensic artists to reconstruct full Neanderthal bodies
based on a pair of skulls that had been discovered in Gibraltar, a trove of
Neanderthal remains.
The
reconstructed “Flint” and “Nana”, standing proudly erect, looked as he
expected: uncannily (as we are tempted to say) human. “The exaggerated features
of skull anatomy,” Finlayson writes, “really fade away once you put skin and
flesh to the bone.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the
best image of the human soul was the human body. Acknowledging the soul – the
dignity – of the Neanderthal might well have to start with acknowledging how
alike their bodies were to ours.
Does the
difference, then, between the Neanderthal and sapiens consist in something to
do with intelligence? But how exactly can we compare our intelligence with that
of beings who aren’t available to sit an IQ test? The answer appears to lie in
working out, from archaeological remains, what they were able to do.
What
immediately catches the eye about the new Neanderthal research is that it has
managed to gather so much from so little. Even in France, where Neanderthal
research thrives, Slimak reminds us that “no archaeological operation has
turned up a new Neanderthal body since the late 1970s”. But the scientists have
learned to make do with the meagre traces the Neanderthals left behind. A bone
and a flint here, a cave there, have proven enough to tell us vastly more than
we knew when the first Neanderthal skeletons appeared in Germany.
A
hypothesis from the 1960s offers a vivid example of the kind of evidence that
can be adduced for Neanderthal intelligence. A team led by the Cambridge
archaeologist Charles McBurney was excavating at a seaside cliff on the Channel
Island of Jersey. An early 20th-century dig had already turned up remnants – in
the form of surviving teeth – of Neanderthal occupation. But at the base of the
cliff, they found an uncommonly large number of bones belonging to mammoth and
rhinoceros. Why were they there?
McBurney’s
field assistant, Katharine Scott, advanced an intriguing hypothesis. Could the
bones be there because the mammoths had tumbled to their deaths from the high
cliff that overlooked the graveyard? Scott pointed to evidence, from surviving
hunter-gatherer societies, of “drive lanes” used to kill large numbers of
bison. The Native American hunters who had been known to practise this kind of
hunting used controlled grass fires to send the animals towards the cliff, and
carefully positioned hunters to keep the animals moving. Had the Neanderthals
used similar hunting techniques?
The old
picture of Neanderthals proposed that they had, at best, a tenuous grasp of how
fire worked – perhaps they were able to use fire when they discovered it, but
were unable to produce it when needed. But this is quite improbable. It is
difficult to sustain the idea that a relatively fur-less species could have
survived in Europe during the glacial periods, when they appear to have
thrived, without a mastery of fire.
And so the
archaeological record indeed suggests. Excavation sites are full of pieces of
flint that show evidence of fire-making. Charcoal remains at these sites
indicate that they were keenest on using resin-rich pine wood as fuel,
suggesting they had decided tastes based on a long history of experimentation.
They may even have learned to use bones to prolong the life of a fire, keeping
them warm while they slept.
The study
of ancient Neanderthal fires is itself a triumph of modern science. The name of
the method – a mouthful – is “fuliginochronology”, a technique by which one
turns a sooty cave into an archive, a veritable guest book of Neanderthal
inhabitation. A fire burning in a cave will leave a mark in the form of
“nano-scale stripes”, which, as Wragg Sykes helpfully explains, are
“essentially tiny stratigraphies written in soot … formed when the fires of
Neanderthals in residence ‘smoked’ the roof and walls, leaving thin soot
films”. As one band of Neanderthals left the cave and another arrived, and
started a new fire, the pattern of soot would produce a sort of unique barcode.
All these fires could hardly be the work of a species with a tenuous grasp of
its workings.
The
Neanderthals, in other words, walked erect, hunted big game and knew how to
control fire: hardly the knuckle-draggers of stereotype.
Last year,
the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was given to the scientist whose work
has put a number to just how human the Neanderthals were. Svante Pääbo, a
Swedish geneticist, was a pioneer in the study of “paleogenetics”, which began
with the discovery of how DNA might be extracted from a range of sources: old
bones and teeth, naturally, but also from cave sediments. The techniques he and
his colleagues refined have enabled us to know vastly more about the
Neanderthals, their bodies, their habits and their habitats, than their
19th-century discoverers could ever have imagined possible.
Perhaps the
most entertaining thing about Pääbo’s 2014 book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of
Lost Genomes, is how much of it is dedicated to an account of the
palaeogeneticist’s greatest enemy: contamination. Pääbo takes us through the
punctilious quest for absolute cleanliness in the laboratory and for methods
that will help distinguish real Neanderthal DNA from samples contaminated with,
say, the investigator’s own.
Having cut
his teeth on trying to extract DNA from Egyptian mummies in the late 1970s,
Pääbo began to apply his methods to even older bodies. His methods culminated
in a series of triumphs. First, he managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from a
piece of ancient bone allowing him to publish, in 1997, the first Neanderthal
DNA sequences. Thirteen years later came the publication of a full Neanderthal
genome, based on DNA extracted from only three individuals.
The genome offered strong support to what had previously been only a hypothesis: that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals had had a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. More significantly, it showed that when early Homo sapiens had walked from their original home in Africa into Eurasia, they had encountered Neanderthals there and interbred with them. The Neanderthals were among the genetic ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians (but not of modern Africans). Eurasians today have between 1.5 and 2.1% of Neanderthal DNA.
Unusually
for a piece of genetics research, Pääbo’s results became the stuff of salacious
tabloid headlines. Playboy magazine interviewed Pääbo about his research,
producing a four-page story titled “Neanderthal Love: Would You Sleep with This
Woman?” The mucky Amazonian Neanderthal woman featured in their illustration
was not designed to be a fantasy object. Meanwhile, men wrote to Pääbo
volunteering to be “examined for Neanderthal heritage” – perhaps seeking a
scientific basis for their stereotypically Neanderthal traits, being “big,
robust, muscular, somewhat crude, and perhaps a little simple”. It was mostly
men who wrote in, though there was the occasional woman convinced her husband
was a Neanderthal.
Other
readers of this research have found Pääbo’s conclusions a source of comfort.
Those wondering what had happened to the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago had long
been tempted by a dark speculation: perhaps we, Homo sapiens, with our superior
weapons and new microbes, had killed them off. But Pääbo’s conclusions give an
otherwise tragic story something of a silver lining: the Neanderthals are still
alive, as alive as the archaic Homo sapiens they interbred with. They live on,
to use an apt cliche, in us, their (very) hybrid heirs. The one vital trace
they have left behind lies in our genes, in the frustrating susceptibility that
modern Eurasians with Neanderthal DNA have to burn in the sun and develop
Crohn’s disease. Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than
any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our
ancestors.
Not all
Neanderthal researchers draw such comfort from the DNA studies. Ludovic Slimak
thinks the Neanderthals no more live on “in us” than an extinct wolf lives on
in the poodle who shares sections of the archaic wolf genome. In Slimak’s way
of thinking about the question, the comforting idea that there was no
extinction, only a sort of “dilution”, is tantamount to a failure to see that
Neanderthals were a genuinely “other” kind of humanity, neither better nor
worse, and certainly not “soulless”. “That humanity”, he writes with a brutal
brevity, “is extinct, totally extinct.”
Researchers
anxious to emphasise how much Neanderthals were like us may well be motivated
by the same worthy aspirations of those who thought they could fight racism by
denying the existence of any real difference between human groups. But that,
Slimak proposes, is itself racist. “Racism is the refusal of difference …
Racism is those old images of Plains Indians trussed up in three-piece suits:
just like us.” He sees this as a denial of radical difference, or “alterity” –
a term popular in French philosophy and the social scientific theory inspired
by it.
The old
knuckle-dragging conceptions of Neanderthals certainly don’t do justice to what
the evidence tells us. But they at least did the Neanderthals the courtesy of
allowing them to be different from us. The challenge, Slimak argues, is not to
dignify the Neanderthal by making them, effectively, identical to us, a sort of
“ersatz sapiens”. The challenge is to let them have their dignity while
remaining themselves, a different kind of human, a different kind of humanity.
The
unavoidable talk of “humanity” in these debates forces us to confront a more
fundamental philosophical question of what exactly we take the “human” to mean
in the first place. Agustín Fuentes, an American primatologist, writes that the
deep moral lesson of our new research on the Neanderthals is that we now need
to “reconceptualise the human to recognise our contemporary diversity,
complexity, and distinction as part of a narrative of hundreds of thousands of
years of life, love, death, and art”. The contemporary champions of the
Neanderthals do indeed seem to take the task before us to be one of
recognition, of acknowledgment. But Slimak worries that the language of
“recognition” conceals what is really going on: projection. And projection,
even from the most honourably egalitarian of motives, is still a distortion and
a failure to respect the dignity of difference.
There
appear to be perils in both directions, perils that the analogy with racism
brings out. These debates echo conversations that have haunted us since
Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492. But it is an essential part of our
conversations about colonialism that enough of the colonised – and enough of
their ways of life – have survived for them, or their descendants, to give
their own answers to these questions about similarity and difference. Importantly,
not every person in a colonised nation has given the same answer to these
questions. Maybe we shouldn’t even assume it has a single correct answer.
It is
surprising just how affecting accounts of Neanderthal extinction can be, how
often it moves otherwise sober science writers to unaccustomed pitches of
lyricism. Being a responsible scientist, Wragg Sykes is aware that “ascribing
any level of formal spirituality to Neanderthals would go far beyond the
archaeological evidence”. But she is convinced that we have enough evidence to
be able to say that “they too encountered all of life’s sensory marvels.
Perhaps as photons from a salmon-belly sunset saturated their retinas, or the
groaning song of a mile-high glacier filled their ears, Neanderthals’ brains translated
this to something like awe”. Her “perhaps” registers her awareness that all
this is speculation, maybe even wishful thinking, not (yet) science.
The
Neanderthals cannot speak. As we put our insistent questions to their bones,
their genes and their hearths, we can never be sure that the voice that answers
isn’t just ours, echoing back to us from an ancient cave. But perhaps the
mistake lies in thinking that the question “Are they like us or different?”
presents a real choice. Perhaps the correct answer to that question is, quite
simply, “Yes”. Maybe the best way to accord them their dignity is to treat them
as we treat each other in at least one respect: by allowing them to be
puzzling.
In puzzling
over them, we reveal something of ourselves. Why might some of us care so much
about creatures so long extinct? No doubt part of the answer is that questions
about the Neanderthals serve as proxies for questions about ourselves. The old
fiction writer’s choice between a picture of the Neanderthals as thugs and one
of them as prototypical flower children no doubt reflects anxieties about human
nature that have haunted the last few centuries of our history: are we built
for war or peace?
But is it
really all that eccentric? Is it really odder to want justice for extinct
Neanderthals than it is to want a wrongly convicted friend to be posthumously
exonerated? Thinkers dismissed in their lifetimes as kooks or cranks have been
vindicated several centuries after their martyrdom, by those who rejoiced that
justice had finally been done. It is, if anything, a part of human nature to
resist the idea that our interests die with us: a part of our nature, and a
beautiful one at that. And it makes one wonder: when the civilisations of Homo
sapiens have been reduced to bones and rubble, will our successors on this
planet, digging up our mounds of plastic waste, be as anxious to give us our
due?
Justice for
Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us. By
Nikhil Krishnan. The Guardian, September 19, 2023.
Explorer
Ludovic Slimak has dedicated decades to unearthing the mystery of our
prehistoric ancestors. Now he has found a missing piece that radically reshapes
our understanding – not just of the Neanderthals but of humanity itself
There’s no
confusing Ludovic Slimak for just another hotel guest. It’s a sweltering Sunday
afternoon in late August and we’ve arranged to meet in the car park of a
guesthouse on the outskirts of Montélimar, southeastern France. The lawn
sprinklers are in full swing; a couple of kids play in the fenced-off poolside
area. Hiding from the heat in my rental car, I’d been concerned we’d struggle
to find each other: Slimak’s email and WhatsApp communication until now have
been at best irregular; the phone signal is patchy in this rural French corner.
As soon as he pulls up in a dust-covered Volkswagen minivan, however, I realise
there’d been no need to worry. Amid the trickle of blissed-out holidaymakers,
Slimak seriously sticks out: he has wild, long hair and an overgrown,
grey-flecked beard; there’s dirt deep beneath his fingernails. It’s 43C,
according to the screen on my dashboard. In shorts and a T-shirt, I’m sweating.
Meanwhile, the man now waving in my direction is dressed in a herringbone
waistcoat, stained linen trousers, denim shirt and Indiana Jones panama hat.
There’s no need for introductions to confirm he’s the man I’m here to visit.
Ludovic Slimak looks a picture-perfect archeological adventurer; a
self-described Neanderthal hunter.
He suggests
we drive in convoy to our final destination, the Grotte Mandrin, a hillside
cave hidden deep in Rhône Valley woodland. “It’s almost impossible to find the
place unless you’ve been there many times,” Slimak explains in fluent English
with a French accent. “And it’s better that way: we don’t want any random
people to – accidentally or otherwise – come across all the treasures we’re
finding.” One of the world’s leading experts on Neanderthals, Slimak has spent
decades travelling across continents in search of insights into this
mysterious, extinct prehistoric species. Just a short drive away, he assures
me, is one the most significant archaeological sites he’s ever spent time
working at. “I started digging there 33 years ago,” he says, “and for the past
20 years I’ve spent a lot of time in this cave, trying to understand
Neanderthals better. It’s here we’re making discoveries that are radically
reshaping our understanding of the history of both Neanderthals and humans,
too.” His book, The Naked Neanderthal, is the result of this research. In 2022,
it was published in France to great acclaim. Now, it’s been translated into
English. That’s why I’m here.
For 15
minutes, we drive in convoy further into the countryside. From a deserted road,
we turn on to an unassuming dirt track. I park up, as instructed, and get into
his VW. We make a bumpy climb a few hundred metres uphill, before we jump out.
I follow him down an overgrown footpath I’d never have noticed. “This cave can
be seen for miles around,” Slimak says, a few steps in front of me. “Locally,
it’s known as ‘The rock of the guide’. The oldest occupation here, we think, is
at least 115,000 years ago. We know there were 500 phases of occupation in this
cave. It’s a hyper-strategic location.”
Sandwiched
between Marseille and Lyon, it feels as if we’re in the middle of nowhere, save
the regular rumble of high-speed trains a hundred or so metres below. “The
national highway and railway lines here represent 70% of European movement
along the north/south axis: a path through the mountains. It’s why this has
historically been very significant.” We turn a final corner. Ahead of us, an
archaeological dig is in full swing. Slimak guides me to the top of the cave
area, where we sit and observe. Seven or eight expert are at work: brushing,
noting, photographing, sorting. His wife – the fellow Neanderthal expert Dr
Laure Metz – is one of those present. Their two sons, nine and six, are back at
the 12th-century castle they rent while on site. Others here are PhD students
and researchers drawn to the dig from all over.
“By all
accounts,” Slimak says, “as a species, Neanderthals are our closest relatives.
And we have parallel histories; common ancestors, I believe, between 300,000
and 500,000 years ago. But then there’s a great divergence.” A separation of
the two creatures. “Homo Sapiens – our ancestors – were mostly in Africa,
although we can see early traces of them in the Near East and Eurasia. There’s
an anomaly, however, with Europe, where we believe Sapiens didn’t really travel
to, home to the largest Neanderthal populations.” The first Neanderthal skull
was discovered in a Belgian cave in 1829; the first bones were found near
Düsseldorf in the 1850s. For millennia, these creatures coexisted on the planet
in different places. “More recently,” Slimak continues, “we have started to
discover there were, in fact, moments where these species met. And here in this
very cave, we’ve made an exciting new discovery.”
At the age
of four, Slimak was asked by his father what he’d like to do when he grew up.
“I said I wanted to make holes in the ground to find old things. I didn’t know
it was a job, until he told me about archaeology.” He’s been at it ever since.
Slimak was born in 1973; his father was a forester. His early years were spent
surrounded by trees, as the family moved across France. “My grandfather lived
in the Pyrenees. He was born in 1918, but really, he was a man from the 19th
century. I spent so much time with him that I also feel like a man from another
era, lost in the modern world.”
By 10,
Slimak had talked his way into various archeological digs he’d come across near
their home. At 14, he was already something of an expert. “By 18, I was working
on a dig here in the Rhône Valley, at a Neanderthal site maybe 70km north.”
These Neanderthals were cannibals. “From then on, I knew I wanted to dedicate
my entire life to these creatures.” At first, university didn’t feel a fit for
this born outdoor explorer. In his 20s, he realised a degree would help him
carve out a career, so enrolled in a course at Aix-Marseille University. To
help pay his way, Slimak learned to play the bagpipes after writing to
Glasgow’s College of Piping, and through busking and playing in Marseille’s
premier late-90s Celtic band earned enough to keep his research afloat. In
2004, he completed his PhD and was soon recruited by Stanford University,
before being hired by France’s prestigious Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, where he’s worked ever since.
His Neanderthal hunting has seen him direct digs everywhere from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic Circle. “It’s an exploration,” he says. “On this planet now, there is no longer any exploring to do horizontally in space, but there’s so much to do in time. Neanderthals offer a huge unknown; still, it’s the greatest exploration.”
What
happened to the Neanderthals – their extinction – is one of the greatest
unsolved mysteries. About 40,000 years ago, they vanished. It’s a topic that
has consumed both academic research and fiction. Much effort has been spent trying
to ascertain what led to their demise. But the way Slimak sees it, this might
no longer be the most prescient question. “Normally, archaeologists find that
if Sapiens come into Neanderthal territory, that’s the end of the Neanderthals.
But here we’ve made a unique discovery.” He jumps down in the dig itself,
pointing between various layers of rock and sediment. “We are finding thousands
of things at every level: this is a flint, a flint, a flint, a bone, a flint,
tooth, flint, rib…” The team here can date every bone, tool or rock they
discover while digging. “Neanderthals first occupied this site more than 100,00
years ago. Then, we now know that 54,000 years ago, the first Homo Sapiens
lived here. After that, there were at least five further phases of Neanderthal
inhabitants over a 12,000 year period.”
It sounds
complex, but Slimak is keen to make clear the takeaway is short and simple.
“Finding Homo Sapiens sandwiched between Neanderthal occupants in these caves?
It totally reshapes our understanding of our origins and rewrites what we’ve
believed previously. If both species brushed up against each other over this
long period of time, far more important than what happened to Neanderthals, we
should be asking: what did these two species do together? Did they communicate?
And most importantly, how did they interact? Because Neanderthals experienced
and existed in the world differently to our ancestors. Not just by culture, but
by their very nature.”
He points
to the way prehistoric Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal crafts are vastly
different. “We might not know much about Neanderthals,” he goes on, “but
through what they created, we can see something incredible. When you take Homo
Sapiens tools made of flint, spanning tens of thousands of years, in different
parts of the world, they’re always the same. Standardised. It can’t be
cultural.” There was likely little contact between these different settlements.
“There’s something innate within the behaviour of Homo Sapiens – within our
behaviour – to act and think in a certain way. It’s in our nature.” Neanderthal
crafts, though, don’t share this pattern of standardisation. “Look carefully at
Neanderthal tools and weapons. They’re all unique. Study thousands and you’ll
find each is completely different. My colleagues never realised that. But when
I did, I saw there was a deep divergence in the way Homo Sapiens and
Neanderthals each understand the world.”
Historically,
he believes humanity has had a problem. “To truly understand something, you
need to be able to compare it to something else. But us as Sapiens? We’ve never
had a species to compare ourselves to.” Yes, there are other animals: great
apes, chimps, gorillas. “But we diverged from these creatures maybe 10m years
ago. Of course, compared to a gorilla we have more creativity and skills. It
gives us a certain image of ourselves– one of superiority. But what happens if
we compare ourselves to something far closer – something far more like
humanity, although different, that only disappeared 40,000 years ago?” Imagine,
he suggests, how differently we’d see ourselves if confronted by
hyper-intelligent aliens.
Slimak feels this comparison can and should be made with Neanderthals. “Their tools and weapons are more unique than ours. As creatures, they were far more creative than us. Sapiens are efficient. Collective. We think the same, and don’t like divergence. And I don’t just mean western culture. Go to any Aboriginal society: there are clear rules and customs, and shared styles of clothing. Expectation to act in a certain manner; to follow regulations.” Our ancestors, he says, lived like this instinctively. “You don’t see that with Neanderthals.” By seeing Neanderthals as a reference point against which we can measure ourselves, Slimak reckons humanity is offered a gift: “We have an opportunity to look in a mirror and see ourselves for what we truly are. To help us redefine, which we must do urgently.”
The way he
sees it, this isn’t just an interesting philosophical theory. “Neanderthals
vanished, I think, because of high human efficiency. And this efficiency now
threatens to destroy us, too. That’s what’s killing the planet’s biodiversity.”
For Slimak, The Naked Neanderthal isn’t a history book. “It’s about us in the
present. Urging humanity to see itself for what it is by comparing us to
something else, in the hope of changing the course of our future. Because by
understanding our nature – and the risk this efficiency poses – we can save
ourselves from a similar fate.” Over millennia, humankind has also developed an
advanced, impressive technology and culture, of a type Neanderthals could never
have imagined. “So while there is something dangerous in our nature, as a
collective we can control and reshape it. Understanding this is the key to
humanity’s future. Because if we don’t think carefully, next time it won’t be
Neanderthals that our efficiency destroys, it’ll be humankind itself that’s the
victim.”
‘I feel
like a man from another era’: Neanderthal hunter Ludovic Slimak. By
Michael Segalov. The Guardian, September
10, 2023.
More than
57,000 years have passed since Paleolithic humans stood before the cave wall,
with its soft, chalky rock beckoning like a blank canvas. Their thoughts and
intentions are forever unknowable. But by dragging their fingers across the
rock and pushing them into the cave wall, these creative cave dwellers
deliberately produced enduring lines and dots that would lie hidden beneath the
French countryside for tens of thousands of years.
Now,
scientists have discovered that these arresting patterns are the oldest known
example of Neanderthal cave engravings.
Authors of
a study published Wednesday in PLOS One analyzed, plotted and 3D modeled these
intriguing markings and compared them with other wall markings of all types to
confirm that they are the organized, intentional products of human hands. The
team also dated deep sediment layers that had buried the cave’s opening to
reveal that it was sealed up with the engravings inside at least 57,000 and as
long as 75,000 years ago—long before Homo sapiens arrived in this part of Europe.
This find,
supported by the cave’s array of distinctly Neanderthal stone tools, identifies
Neanderthals as the cave art creators and adds to growing evidence that our
closest relatives were more complex than their dim caveman stereotype might
suggest.
“For a long
time it was thought that Neanderthals were incapable of thinking other than to
ensure their subsistence,” notes archaeologist and study co-author Jean-Claude
Marquet, of the University of Tours, France. “I think this discovery should
lead prehistorians who have doubts about Neanderthal skills to reconsider.”
La
Roche-Cotard is an ancient cave nestled on a wooded hillside above the Loire
River. It was first uncovered in 1846 when quarries were operated in the area
during construction of a railroad line. When it was first excavated in 1912,
the array of prehistoric stone implements and cut-marked and charred bones of
bison, horses and deer within revealed that Paleolithic hunters had frequented
the site many thousands of years earlier.
Scientists
first noted the finger tracings, with their organized appearance, as early as
the 1970s. Beginning in 2016, the authors of the new study diligently plotted
the various distinct panels and created 3D models for comparisons with other
known examples of Paleolithic engravings. They also identified the cave’s many
other wall markings made by the claws of animals, like cave bears, and by metal
or other implements during modern incursions into the cave after 1912. Marquet
says this process helped to show that the engraved panels were created in a
structured and intentional manner. “These panels were not produced in a hurry,
without thought,” he says.
The results
also suggested that the designs were created by human hands, working the soft
chalk wall, a material known as tuffeau, made of fine quartz grains and ancient
mollusk shell fragments. The rock is permeable and covered with a fragile
sandy-clay film.
“When the
tip of a finger comes into contact with this film, a trace is left in the shape
of an impact; when the tip of the finger moves, an elongated digital trace is
left,” Marquet says. He knows this process firsthand. The team reproduced this
method in a nearby cave made of the same type of rock. They marked walls using
tools of bone, wood, antler and stone, as well as with their fingers, which
produced engravings very similar to the ancient examples.
“These
images are not for us, and we do not have the keys to understanding their
meaning, their possibly diverse and multiple functions,” he says.
Scientists know that the cave’s assemblage of discarded stone tools are of the Mousterian technology, sophisticated flake implements that are typically associated with Neanderthals. This suggests the cave was in use exclusively by Neanderthals, who in turn created the carvings on the walls. However, the authors note they can’t establish a direct relationship between those discarded tools and the engravings.
But another
strong line of geological evidence comes from analyzing nearby sediments.
During the Paleolithic, the Loire River, once closer to the hillside, flooded
the cave numerous times and helped to carve out parts of it. Eventually those
floods deposited thick sediments that, aided by erosion from wind and the
hillside above after the river changed course, completely sealed off the cave.
Clear evidence remains showing how layers of sediment were put down over the
years, which would have completely covered the slope and cave entrance to a
depth of more than 30 feet.
This
covering persisted in place until 1846, when material was extracted for the railroad
embankment, exposing the cave entrance. The sediments above and around the cave
entrance, part of the layers that covered it before 19th-century excavations,
were dated by optically stimulated luminescence dating, which can determine how
long it has been since grains of sediment like quartz were exposed to daylight.
A total of 50 sediment samples collected showed the cave was very likely sealed
up at least 57,000 years ago, well before humans lived in this part of France.
Previously, the oldest cave engravings attributed to Neanderthals were an
abstract cross-hatching pattern found in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, and dated to
some 39,000 years ago.
Robert
notes that several lines of evidence—the presence of Neanderthal tools, the
geological evidence and the analysis of the engravings themselves—converge to
demonstrate that the cave walls were adorned by Neanderthals.
“The authors present as convincing a case as
can be made from a site disturbed by early excavations that the animal and
human marks on its walls were left long before the arrival of our own species
in Europe,” says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England,
who wasn’t involved with the research. “Given that the cave’s archaeology is
exclusively indicative of Neanderthals, with no evidence of subsequent Upper
Paleolithic occupation, presumably because the cave was by this time
inaccessible, this provides strong indirect, cumulative evidence that
Neanderthals produced the finger markings.”
Humans from
our family of ancestors began expressing themselves visually a very long time
ago; Homo erectus carved zigzag patterns onto a shell more than half a million
years ago. A series of handprints and footprints, which may have been
deliberately placed by hominin children some 200,000 years ago, has been found
on the Tibetan Plateau.
Examples of
Homo sapiens’ very different style of cave art appear later. A purplish pig
found on the walls of a cave hidden in a highland valley on the Indonesian
island of Sulawesi was painted an estimated 45,500 years ago. If that date is
correct, the Leang Tedongnge cave could be the earliest known work of
figurative art, in which painters recreate real-world objects rather than
producing abstract designs. The collections at Spain’s El Castillo cave and
France’s Chauvet cave, where sophisticated lions and mammoths were painted
perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, are notable early examples of this complex,
figurative art that is unlike anything Neanderthals are known to have
produced—at least so far.
But that
distinction doesn’t necessarily mean that Neanderthal creations should be
regarded as products of simpler minds or thought processes. Robert believes that
comparisons between Neanderthal and Sapiens traditions aren’t necessary. For
each species, he believes, the appearance of prehistoric carvings and paintings
is less about when people were capable of making them and more about when
social dynamics created a need for them at a specific time—even if those needs
are a mystery to us today.
Oldest
Known Neanderthal Engravings Were Sealed in a Cave for 57,000 Years : The art
was created long before modern humans inhabited France’s Loire Valley. By Brian
Handwerk. Smithsonian Magazine, June 21, 2023.
Neanderthals may have lived in larger groups than previously believed, hunting massive elephants that were up to three times bigger than those of today, according to a new study.
