[Inviting a Neanderthal for the holidays? Thats a good thing. Not
only are they the closest relative of homo sapiens, but theres a bit
of Neanderthal in almost all of us. New findings about them are coming
thick and fast.]
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NEANDERTHALS: MORE KNOWABLE NOW THAN EVER  
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Tim Vernimmen
November 28, 2023
Knowable Magazine
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_ Inviting a Neanderthal for the holidays? That's a good thing. Not
only are they the closest relative of homo sapiens, but there's a bit
of Neanderthal in almost all of us. New findings about them are coming
thick and fast. _

, CREDIT: © NEANDERTHAL MUSEUM, HOLGER NEUMANN SOCIETY

 

Neanderthals are _Homo sapiens_’s closest-known relative, and today
we know we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, up until
the very end of their long reign some 40,000 years ago. Most
researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get
along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to
Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th
century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse. Even
today, their name is sometimes hurled at misbehaving members of our
own species, though there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of
prehistoric hooliganism.

Well, with one exception, perhaps: What they did in Bruniquel Cave in
southwestern France would certainly be frowned upon today. Hundreds of
intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged into two
large, ellipsoid structures and several smaller stacks, during a time
when — as researchers confirmed in 2016 — only Neanderthals were
roaming Europe [[link removed]]. No one knows
what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward
creativity and perhaps even symbolism.

In Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France, Neanderthals broke off
hundreds of stalagmites and arranged them into two large, ellipsoid
structures. Their purpose is unknown.

CREDIT: SCINEWS

No other structures of this kind have so far been discovered. But
there have been many other hints that Neanderthal minds were occupied
with things many researchers did not expect, says archaeologist April
Nowell of the University of Victoria in Canada. The author of a 2021
book, _Growing Up in the Ice Age_, Nowell outlines the most exciting
new discoveries in a 2023 article, “Rethinking Neandertals
[[link removed]],”
in the _Annual Review of Anthropology_.

“In the past 10 years, things have changed quite dramatically,”
she says. “I never thought we’d have the wide range of information
about their lives that we do now.” In addition to many new fossil
discoveries, new methods for analyzing ancient biological molecules
have allowed researchers to examine ancient DNA
[[link removed]]
and proteins that they didn’t even know still persisted.

Most remarkably, researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal
genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their
biology, as well as our own — there is no longer any doubt that
human beings and Neanderthals interbred. “Neanderthals are partly
our ancestors, even if we didn’t evolve from them,” says
paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in
London.

In addition, the many freshly unearthed or newly analyzed artifacts,
some now confidently assigned to Neanderthals thanks to improved
methods for dating archaeological finds, make for quite a collection.
“If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said there was
quite a big gap in behavior, and Neanderthals would have lacked many
of the complex behaviors we find in _Homo sapiens_,” Stringer says.
“Now that gap has narrowed considerably.”

Here’s some of what we have gleaned from what our close relatives
left behind when they roamed the Earth between 400,000 and 40,000
years ago, across most of Eurasia.

Arts and crafts

Some of the Neanderthal artifacts discovered were very practical in
nature. Bits of twisted wood fiber attached to a modified stone flake
[[link removed]] found in France in 2017
suggest that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make rope, for
example, which may have opened the door to fashioning other objects
like clothes, bags, nets and mats. There also is evidence that
Neanderthals were heating birch bark to make adhesives — no mean
feat. “A few researchers have recently tried to do the same
[[link removed]] in similar
circumstances,” says Nowell, “and it’s a lot harder than most
people thought.”

Beyond daily chores, Neanderthals evidently liked to adorn themselves.
We now know they were using colorful pigments like red ochre
[[link removed]] as far back as
200,000 to 250,000 years ago, maybe not just on objects, but also on
their own bodies — and they may have sometimes imported the
substance from tens of kilometers away. Excavations have also revealed
perforated and sometimes painted shells that were likely strung
together and worn. A creative Neanderthal in Croatia made a necklace
or other adornment out of white-tailed eagle talons
[[link removed]],
and elsewhere, tool marks found on bird bones suggest that feathers
were also popular.

 
What about the famous cave art found in many sites in Europe and
elsewhere? Until recently, none of these were thought to be
Neanderthal. But in 2018, a study in _Science_ demonstrated that the
painted lines and dots on the walls of a number of caves in Spain must
have been made by Neanderthals
[[link removed]], since they were
dated to a period when no _Homo sapiens_  were yet around. There also
is evidence of engraving — “hashtags
[[link removed]]” carved into a cave wall in
Gibraltar, as well as on a pebble
[[link removed]], a flint flake
[[link removed]] and a giant deer’s
toe bone [[link removed]].

There are no indications yet that Neanderthals created any
recognizable depictions of, for example, animals or people, says
Nowell. That may have been a _Homo sapiens_ innovation. “There are
so many of these little isolated examples of interesting things
Neanderthals were doing, these sorts of pulses of symbolic behavior.
But they don’t seem to last for long periods of time or lead to
something else as they clearly have in _Homo sapiens _populations,”
she says.

Growing up human

One explanation for the differences in artistic expression may be that
Neanderthals just thought differently. Perhaps a member of our own
species excitedly asking a Neanderthal why they drew or carved what
they did would have received nothing but a shrug. It is, of course,
very hard to reconstruct what differences there may have been in brain
structure or cognition, but Nowell is intrigued by a number of recent
studies in which human brain cells were engineered to contain
Neanderthal versions of some key brain development genes.

When grown in dishes in the lab, clusters of cells engineered to have
one of these Neanderthal gene variants developed into minute
brain-like structures that had a more popcorn-like shape than _Homo
sapiens_ brain cells do [[link removed]],
while those with _sapiens_ genes were more spherical. In another study
of a different brain development gene, the
[[link removed]]_sapiens_
[[link removed]] mini-brains
formed more neurons in the same time period than mini-brains
containing the Neanderthal version.

These findings certainly suggest that the genetic differences between
our species affect the structure of our brains. Still, it’s hard to
know what these differences mean, Stringer says, or even if those gene
variants are truly Neanderthal. Studying a more genetically diverse
sample of _Homo sapiens_ today might reveal more variation in our own
species, and possibly more of an overlap with Neanderthals, he says.

 
“I do think there were cognitive differences between Neanderthals
and _Homo sapiens_,” says Nowell. But, she adds, differences in
demography may also have created more obstacles for Neanderthal
culture to flourish. Neanderthals were thin on the ground — their
global population may never have numbered more than 100,000 at any
point in time. Maybe ideas didn’t spread because Neanderthals were
too isolated, Nowell says, and then disappeared when local groups died
out. _Homo sapiens_ reached much higher densities and would have had
much larger social networks.

New evidence indicates that _Homo sapiens _kids probably had longer
childhoods, too. “We think Neanderthal girls probably reached sexual
maturity earlier,” says Nowell: Studies of relatively commonly found
fossils of Neanderthal children suggest that newborns had larger
brains [[link removed]] than _sapiens_
newborns do and that they were growing faster
[[link removed]].

“A longer childhood allows children more time to learn and
experiment in relative safety,” Nowell says, giving _sapiens_
children an edge.

She also notes that learning doesn’t just mean making new neurons
and connections
[[link removed]]:
It also involves pruning away connections that don’t prove useful.
So if young _sapiens_ brains were producing more neurons than
Neanderthal brains, as the experiments suggest, and if our childhoods
also lasted longer, “this might have supported more extensive
learning,” she says, with more room for trial and error and making
and breaking connections.

In(ter)breeding

New studies have recently provided some intriguing snapshots of
Neanderthal family life. An analysis of DNA from remains of 11
individuals found in Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia revealed that some
were closely related [[link removed]] and
probably lived around the same time, says paleoanthropologist Bence
Viola of the University of Toronto, who was involved in the
excavation. “We’ve found a father-daughter pair, and a few
individuals who either descended from the same mother or perhaps were
mother, daughter and granddaughter.”

Genetic similarities were very high among all studied individuals,
indicating that this was probably a very isolated population. “Men
were even more highly related than women,” Viola adds, “suggesting
it was probably more common for women to join a new group to find a
mate.” This was probably the ancestral pattern in humans as well —
it certainly still is in chimpanzees.

Though Neanderthals may have looked slightly odd to _Homo sapiens_,
studies of ancient DNA show they did interbreed with our species. To
Viola, that has important implications. “_Homo sapiens_ clearly
recognized Neanderthals as mating partners, which suggests they
thought of them as humans — maybe ‘the weird guys living behind
the mountains,’ but still, fellow humans,” he says. “More or
less whenever both species extensively co-occurred, there has been
genetic exchange.

 
An irresistible kiss

DNA may not have been the only thing our _Homo sapiens_ ancestors
exchanged with Neanderthals. Although our last common ancestor is
thought to have lived at least 450,000 years ago, a 2017 study
analyzing the DNA in calcified dental plaque on Neanderthal teeth
[[link removed]] showed that populations of a
common microbe living in the mouths of Neanderthals and _Homo sapiens_
genetically diverged at least 300,000 years later. This suggests that
both species acquired the microbe from the same source around the same
time — or somehow passed it to each other.

There are, of course, other possible explanations, such as shared
food, says paleogeneticist Laura Weyrich of Penn State University, who
led the study. “But the suggestion that it might have been a kiss
proved irresistible to the media,” she says. “And you know, it
might have been.”

That study also revealed other interesting aspects of Neanderthal
behavior. The DNA analysis suggested that a Spanish Neanderthal with a
dental abscess had likely been eating moldy plant matter covered in
penicillin-producing fungus, as well as poplar bark containing
pain-killing salicylic acid.

The study also cast significant doubt on the pervasive idea that all
Neanderthals were staunch carnivores. While one Neanderthal from Spy
Cave in Belgium had a fairly stereotypical diet of wild sheep and
woolly rhino, the research revealed that this young adult also liked
some mushrooms with their meal. “Neanderthals from El Sidrón Cave
in Spain, on the other hand, didn’t seem to eat much meat at all,”
says Weyrich. “Instead, it seems they mostly fed on mushrooms and,
surprisingly, pine nuts.”

The lack of vegetables might be excusable — in a 2022 study, again
based on the Neanderthal genome, an analysis of odor receptor genes
found that Neanderthals would have been less sensitive to odors
perceived as green, floral and spicy
[[link removed]] than we are. Yet at the
site of Shanidar in current-day Iraq, researchers did find evidence
that Neanderthals were cooking pulses such as lentils
[[link removed]], while another recent study
found grains of starch that suggest Neanderthals in Italy — of
course — were making flour
[[link removed]].

A Neanderthal nibbling pine nuts might sound like the pinnacle of
flexibility, resilience and even good taste, but one gruesome detail
needs to be mentioned here: Bones in El Sidrón also show signs of
cannibalism [[link removed]]. This may have
had a cultural significance we are unaware of — rites involving
cannibalism
[[link removed]]
have existed in many cultures — but it doesn’t look as if the
local population was thriving 50,000 years ago. (This is in stark
contrast with a Neanderthal group in Germany 125,000 years ago that
was apparently big enough to catch, butcher and eat elephants
[[link removed]].)

 
Decline and persistence

Was cannibalism a sign of a species in decline, maybe even before
_Homo sapiens _was making its first forays into Europe? It’s hard to
say, but we have long wondered why Neanderthals went extinct and we
didn’t. “Perhaps if _Homo sapiens_ hadn’t been there,” Nowell
says, “that niche would have stayed open for Neanderthals?”

There’s no evidence of any violence between Neanderthals and modern
humans, Nowell adds; few researchers today seem to believe that _Homo
sapiens_  was hunting down Neanderthals. A higher infant mortality
rate may be part of the explanation, Nowell says. “Even a small
difference can lead to population decline across generations.”

But what was it about Neanderthals that put them at a disadvantage —
if they were? Might it just have been bad luck? “I think, as _Homo
sapiens _numbers grew after 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals were
already in trouble,” says Stringer. “The environment in this
period was fluctuating constantly from nearly as warm as the present
day to freezing cold, sometimes within a few decades.” All the
vegetation would be changing, animals were moving. “Maybe _Homo
sapiens_ was better able to cope with those changes, because they were
networking more, helping each other out or exchanging cultural
knowledge,” he says.

Even without direct confrontation, it’s conceivable that
Neanderthals would have been compelled to give way to _Homo sapiens
_and ended up on the margins of what used to be their favorite places
to be. Nevertheless, says Nowell, Neanderthals may have played a role
in our success. _Homo sapiens_ might have brought new technologies,
but it’s possible they also learned skills from Neanderthals, who
had lived in Europe for millennia.

Eventually, the remaining Neanderthals, living in shrinking groups
with few, if any, attractive mates, many of them close relatives,
might simply have decided to join a _Homo sapiens _group, and could
well have been welcomed there, says Viola. And because of our
interbreeding, something of Neanderthals still survives in us.

“There’s more Neanderthal DNA in the billions of humans alive
today than there ever was when they were still around,” Viola says.
“In a way, Neanderthals are still here.”

10.1146/knowable-112823-4

_TIM VERNIMMEN is a freelance science journalist born near Antwerp,
Belgium. This means around 2 percent of his DNA probably originates
from Neanderthals, though he hasn’t verified that yet._

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